我不知道“最简单的”，但简单的理解可以做到:

>>> my_string = "Mary had a little lamb"
>>> sum(char == 'a' for char in my_string)
4

利用内置的和，生成器理解和bool是整数的子类的事实:如何乘字符等于'a'。

spam = 'have a nice day'
var = 'd'


def count(spam, var):
    found = 0
    for key in spam:
        if key == var:
            found += 1
    return found
count(spam, var)
print 'count %s is: %s ' %(var, count(spam, var))

Str.count (sub[， start[， end]]) 返回子字符串sub在范围[start, end]中不重叠出现的次数。可选参数start和end被解释为片表示法。

>>> sentence = 'Mary had a little lamb'
>>> sentence.count('a')
4

正则表达式?

import re
my_string = "Mary had a little lamb"
len(re.findall("a", my_string))

不超过这个IMHO -你可以添加上或下的方法

def count_letter_in_str(string,letter):
    return string.count(letter)

你可以使用.count():

>>> 'Mary had a little lamb'.count('a')
4