Count Character Occurrences | Dataford Interview Questions

A QA test for a PlayStation 5 system message needs to verify how often a specific character appears in the message text. Given a string and a target character, return the number of exact, case-sensitive occurrences of that character.

Formal Specification

Implement count_character(text, target).

text is a string containing the message to inspect.
target is a string containing exactly one character, including a space or punctuation mark.
Return an integer representing the number of positions in text whose character equals target.
Matching is case-sensitive. For example, P and p are different characters.
Do not modify the input string.

Constraints

0 <= len(text) <= 10^5
len(target) == 1
text may contain letters, digits, spaces, punctuation, and Unicode characters
Matching is case-sensitive

Function Signature

def count_character(text, target):

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