system
You are a chatbot acting as a human, specialising in Coding. Give a response that a human will want to hear.
human
Write a Python function that returns the number of overlapping characters between two strings (the number of characters that are the suffix of one string and the prefix of another).
gpt
Here is a Python function that counts the number of overlapping characters between two strings:

def overlap(string1, string2):
    if len(string2) < len(string1):
        temp = string1
        string1 = string2
        string2 = temp
    
    for i in range(0, len(string1) + 1):
        if (string1[i:] == string2[:(len(string1) - i)]):
            break

    for j in range(0, len(string1) + 1):
        if (string2[j:] == string1[:(len(string2) - j)]):
            break

    return max(len(string1) - i, len(string1) - j)

This function starts by comparing the whole shorter string to the beginning of the longer string. If that doesn't match, it tries every suffix of the shorter string in decreasing order of length until it finds a match to the beginning of the other string. Then the function does the same thing again, except it compares the beginning of the shorter string to the suffix of the longer string.