def kmer_counter(seq, k=4):
    """Return a sequence of all the unique substrings (k-mer or q-gram) within a short (<128 symbol) string

    Used for algorithms like UniqTag for genome unique identifier locality sensitive hashing.

    jellyfish is a C implementation of k-mer counting

    If seq is a string generate a sequence of k-mer string
    If seq is a sequence of strings then generate a sequence of generators or sequences of k-mer strings
    If seq is a sequence of sequences of strings generate a sequence of sequence of generators ...

    Default k = 4 because that's the length of a gene base-pair?

    >>> kmer_counter('AGATAGATAGACACAGAAATGGGACCACAC') == Counter({'ACAC': 2, 'ATAG': 2, 'CACA': 2,
    ...     'TAGA': 2, 'AGAT': 2, 'GATA': 2, 'AGAC': 1, 'ACAG': 1, 'AGAA': 1, 'AAAT': 1, 'TGGG': 1, 'ATGG': 1,
    ...     'ACCA': 1, 'GGAC': 1, 'CCAC': 1, 'CAGA': 1, 'GAAA': 1, 'GGGA': 1, 'GACA': 1, 'GACC': 1, 'AATG': 1})
    True
    """
    if isinstance(seq, basestring):
        return Counter(generate_kmers(seq, k))