Remove a combination of characters in a string python

Question

Regex newbie alert please be gentle. I am having strings like:

sent = 'The type of vehicle FRFR7800 is the fastest'

I want to remove the duplicate occurence of the substring 'FR'. So the string should be:

sent = 'The type of vehicle FR7800 is the fastest'.

I think I have spent more than 2 hours reading/trying the tutorial of re and the more pythonic way of groupby and I really can't figure it out. I also searched the similar questions and most of the results are covering the case when there are I repeated same characters e.g. having strings like 'dddddaaaaaggggg' etc. A couple of them helped but I ended up deleting the all occurences of 'FR'.

For example I tried:

sent = re.sub(r'FC{1}', '', sent)
sent = re.sub(r'FC|', '', sent)

These removed completely the occurence of 'FR'. When I changed it to:

sent = re.sub(r'FC{2}', '', sent)

Nothing happened, the string remained having the 'FR' occurence repeated.

Can somebody help me with or give me a hint ?

@VishalSingh You're hardcoded FR as the substring, which I doubt is what the OP wants here. — Tim Biegeleisen
– Tim Biegeleisen, Commented Mar 4, 2021 at 4:43
@Vishal Singh thank you for the answer. I have also found that I don't know how to syntax it in python. I tried it and removed all occurences. I tried: sent = re.sub(r'(\w{2})\1', '', sent) — wannabedatasth
– wannabedatasth, Commented Mar 4, 2021 at 4:52

Vishal Singh · Accepted Answer · 2021-03-04 04:59:47Z

2

import re

sent = "The type of vehicle FRFR7800 is the fastest"
regex = r"(\w{2})\1"

print(re.sub(regex, r"\g<1>", sent))

answered Mar 4, 2021 at 4:59

Vishal Singh

6,2522 gold badges19 silver badges34 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

2 Comments

wannabedatasth Over a year ago

thank you! This solved it. Didn't realise that in the replace string parameter ( r"\g<1>" ) I could use a regular expression too.

Mark Over a year ago

This is nice, but be careful that you really understand the text you will work on since it replaces all pairs like this and these pair exist in English. ie. see results with "The papal cocoa-puff dispenser of hippopotamus-shaped vehicle FRFR7800 is in crisis"

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Remove a combination of characters in a string python

1 Answer 1

2 Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

2 Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related