#This is my long string object I would like to count all substring in:
>>>type(contents2)
<class 'str'>

#This is my regular expression substring I want to count the instances of, any size lengths of N's
>>>import re
>>> nstring = re.compile(r"[^N][N+][^N]")

#Search through the string and count the number of times the substring appears
>>>len(re.findall(nstring, contents2))