Delete specific duplicated punctuation from string

September 29, 2022

I have this string s = "(0|\\+33)[1-9]( *[0-9]{2}){4}". And I want to delete just the duplicated just one ' \ ', like I want the rsult to look like (0|\+33)[1-9]( *[0-9]{2}){4}.

When I used this code, all the duplicated characters are removed:
result = "".join(dict.fromkeys(s)).

But in my case I want just to remove the duplicated ' \ '. Any help is highly appreciated

>Solution :

The function you need is replace

s = "(0|\\+33)[1-9]( *[0-9]{2}){4}"
result = s.replace("\\","")

EDIT

I see now that you want to remove just one \ and not both.
In order to do this you have to modify the call to replace this way

result = s.replace("\","",1) # last argument is the number of occurrances to replace

result = s.replace("\\","\")

EDIT of the EDIT

Backslashes are special in Python.
I’m using Python 3.10.5. If I do

x = "ab\c"
y = "ab\\c"
print(len(x)==len(y))

I get a True.
That’s because backslashes are used to escape special characters, and that makes the backslash a special character 🙂
I suggest you to try a little bit with replace until you get what you need.