Python Regex - 替换连续的标点符号

Question

I have a bunch of online reviews, and I would like to replace things such as " ,,, or !! with , and ! , respectively, for example. I think my question boils down twofold:

1. How do I compile a regex pattern to detect two+ back-to-back punctuation?
2. Upon some method such as replace, how do I retrieve which particular pattern was detected? So that I could use that pattern to replace its consecutiveness.

As an extension, how about replacing weird punctuation that you may see in Tweets such as !! ! :) !! ! :) !! ! :) ?

Any guidance helps.

Answer 1

You could use re.sub here:

inp = "Hello World!!!"
output = re.sub(r'([!?,;])\1+', r'\1', inp)
print(inp + "\n" + output)

This prints:

Hello World!!!
Hello World!

You may expand the character class [!?,;] to include other punctuation characters as you want.