title: Optimizing counting characters within a string
body: <p>I just created a simple method to count occurences of each character within a string, without taking caps into account.</p>
  
  <pre><code>static List&lt;int&gt; charactercount(string input)
          {
              char[] characters = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz".ToCharArray();
              input = input.ToLower();
  
              List&lt;int&gt; counts = new List&lt;int&gt;();
              foreach (char c in characters)
              {
                  int count = 0;
                  foreach (char c2 in input) if (c2 == c)
                      {
                          count++;
                      }
  
                  counts.Add(count);
               }
  
              return counts;
  
          }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there a cleaner way to do this (i.e. without creating a character array to hold every character in the alphabet) that would also take into account numbers, other characters, caps, etc?</p>