(Python) How do I remove all adjacent substrings in a string and keep only the first occurrence?

I’ve seen similar questions to this but unfortunately I couldn’t find the exact case for my problem. What I was looking to do is remove all adjacent occurrences of a set substring but keep the first occurrence.

For example, given

s = "USER USER some words USER USER USER words"
substring = "USER"

The output I want would be

"USER some words USER words"

I’ve tried using sub(), split() but I couldn’t find the answer I wanted. Would appreciate any help, thank you.

>Solution :

Try re:

import re

s = "USER USER some words USER USER USER words"
substring = "USER"

s = re.sub(fr"({re.escape(substring)})(\s+\1)+", substring, s)
print(s)

Prints:

USER some words USER words