I feel I am having the most difficulty explaining this well enough for a search engine to pick up on what I’m looking for. The behavior is essentially this:
string = "aaaaaaaaare yooooooooou okkkkkk"
would become "aare yoou okk", with the maximum number of repeats for any given character is two.
Matching the excess duplicates, and then re.sub -ing it seems to me the approach to take, but I can’t figure out the regex statement I need.
The only attempt I feel is even worth posting is this – (\w)\1{3,0}
Which matched only the first instance of a character repeating more than three times – so only one match, and the whole block of repeated characters, not just the ones exceeding the max of 2.
Any help is appreciated!
>Solution :
The regexp should be (\w)\1{2,} to match a character followed by at least 2 repetitions. That’s 3 or more when you include the initial character.
The replacement is then \1\1 to replace with just two repetitions.
string = "aaaaaaaaare yooooooooou okkkkkk"
new_string = re.sub(r'(\w)\1{2,}', r'\1\1', string)