如何使用允许字符跳过的正则表达式找到字符串在文本中出现的次数

Question

I need to explain a little: I want to find how many "abab" exists in "ababab" string.

But skipping is valid like

[abab]ab

[aba]ba[b]

[ab]ab[ab]

[a]ba[bab]

these are all valid, my attempt was to use < /\w*?a\w*?b\w*?a\w*?b/g > which of course did not work. What should I do?

Python solutions are also good for me, I thought regex would be good for this.

Edit: Marked similar question is quite different to my question

Answer 1

For the little testing I have done, this works:

def abab(to_check):
    return is_a(0, to_check)


def is_a(i, to_check):
    count = 0
    for index, c in enumerate(to_check):
        if c == 'a':
            count = count + is_b(i + 1, to_check[index + 1:])
    return count


def is_b(i, to_check):
    count = 0
    for index, c in enumerate(to_check):
        if c == 'b':
            if i == 2:
                count = count + 1
            else:
                count = count + is_a(i, to_check[index + 1:])
    return count


print(abab("ababab"))