how to identify and print a pattern inside an ascii file in python 2?

I am trying to develop a program that can read patterns from a txt file using Python 2.x. This pattern is supposed to be a bug:

| |
###O
| |

And the pattern doesn't include the whitespaces.

So far I have come up with a way to open the txt file, read it and process the data inside of it but I can't think of a way to make Python understand this pattern as 1, instead of counting each character. I've tried regular expressions but it ended up showing an output similar to this:

| |
###O
| | 
   | |
   ###O
   | |
         | |
         ###O
         | |

Instead of just saying how many of this pattern were detected inside the file, for example:

There were 3 occurrences.

Update: So far i got this

file = open('bug.txt', 'r')
data = file.read() #read content from file to a string
occurrences = data.count('| |\n\'###O\'\n| |\n')

print('Number of occurrences of the pattern:', occurrences)

But this is not working. The file itself has the patterns 3 times but with whitespaces in between, but the whitespace is not part of the pattern and when i try to paste the pattern from the file it breaks the lines, and if i correct the pattern to | | ###O | | it shows 0 occurrences because its not really the pattern.

Solution

It depends on how you store your ASCII data, but if you convert it to a string you can use the python .count() function.

For example:

# define string
ascii_string = "| | ###O | | | | ###O | | | | ###O | |"
pattern = "| | ###O | |"

count = ascii_string.count(pattern)

# print count in python 3+
print("Occurrences:", count)

# print count in python 2.7
print "Occurrences:", count

This will result in:

Occurrences: 3