Question

Write a function named count_vowels that accepts two arguments: a string and an empty dictionary. The function should count the number of times each vowel (the letters a, e, i, o, and u) appears in the string, and use the dictionary to store those counts. When the function ends, the dictionary should have exactly 5 elements. In each element, the key will be a vowel (lowercase) and the value will be the number of times the vowel appears in the string. For example, if the string argument is 'Now is the time', the function will store the following elements in the dictionary: 'a': 0 • 'e': 2 'i': 2 'o': 1 'u': 0 The function should not return a value.

Answer 1

To write a function named count_vowels that counts the number of times each vowel appears in a string and stores the counts in a dictionary, you can use the provided code as a starting point.

Step-by-step explanation:

To write a function named count_vowels, you can use the following code:

def count_vowels(string, dictionary):
vowels = ['a', 'e', 'i', 'o', 'u']
for vowel in vowels:
count = string.count(vowel)
dictionary[vowel] = count

In this function, we iterate over a list of vowels and use the count() method to count the number of times each vowel appears in the string. Then, we assign the count to the key in the dictionary.

For example, if the string is 'Now is the time', the dictionary will have the following key-value pairs: 'a': 0, 'e': 2, 'i': 2, 'o': 1, 'u': 0. Note that we do not return anything from the function, as the goal is to update the dictionary in-place.

Answer 2

The count_vowels function calculates the number of times each vowel appears in a string and stores the counts in a passed dictionary. It handles counting by iterating through each character of the string and updating the dictionary accordingly. The function works with the vowels a, e, i, o, and u and modifies the dictionary in place.

Step-by-step explanation:

The function count_vowels is designed to accept a string and an empty dictionary and count the occurrences of each vowel (a, e, i, o, u) within the string. To achieve this, the function iterates through the string, checks each character, and if it is a vowel, increments the count in the dictionary. By the end of the function, the dictionary contains keys for each vowel with values representing their counts in the string.

Here's a Python example of how the function might look:

def count_vowels(s, vowel_counts):
vowels = 'aeiou'
for vowel in vowels:
vowel_counts[vowel] = 0
for char in s.lower():
if char in vowels:
vowel_counts[char] += 1

This function does not return any value because it modifies the dictionary passed as an argument, which holds the vowel counts after the function executes.