Python not recognizing regex

Question

I'm using the solution obtained from this question Regular expression to match any character being repeated more than 10 times

The regex you need is /(.)\1{9,}/.

https://regex101.com/ is recognizing it, grep recognizes it, but python does not.

Ultimately I want to replace the match with a single space, for example:

>> text = 'this is text???????????????'
>> pattern = re.compile(r'/(.)\1{5,}/')
>> re.sub(pattern,'\s',text)
'this is text '

However, search, findall, even match do not recognize the pattern, any idea as to why?

Pythex.org is your friend

jDo
– jDo

2016-04-06 00:27:53 +00:00
Commented Apr 6, 2016 at 0:27 — jDo
– jDo, Commented Apr 6, 2016 at 0:27

Amadan · Accepted Answer · 2016-04-06 00:31:14Z

3

re.sub(r'(.)\1{9,}', ' ',text)

The slashes are not part of the regex, they are a syntactic construct by which some languages form regex literals (and in case of PHP's preg module, an oddity).

With your regexp, you would have matched this is text/?????????????/, and transformed it into this is text\s (note that \s has no meaning in the replacement string).

edited Apr 6, 2016 at 0:31

answered Apr 6, 2016 at 0:28

Amadan

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3 Comments

Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams Over a year ago

The hilarious part is that the second answer to that question contains the correct regex for Python.

Amadan Over a year ago

@IgnacioVazquez-Abrams: Oh haha indeed!

Leb Over a year ago

Even tho it was included, the explanation was great. Thank you.

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