Regex to search for a pattern and replace the pattern and sub-string preceding it

Question

I am new to python. I have a string from which I would like to select pattern false and the characters preceding it until hyphen with some other string if required.

Example:

string = -I false -n 0 -i false -X false -E 0 --min-repeat-size 5 --min-repeat-entropy 0 --no-partial-observations false -u false

Result string should be like this:

string = -n 0 -E 0 --min-repeat-size 5 --min-repeat-entropy 0 

I use re method to replace false with another character but could not get what I wanted.

Answer 1

>>> import re
>>> 
>>> string = "-I false -n 0 -i false -X false -E 0 --min-repeat-size 5 --min-repeat-entropy 0 --no-partial-observations false -u false"
>>> 
>>> string = re.sub(r"-{1,2}[\w-]+\s+false\s?", "", string)
>>> 
>>> string
'-n 0 -E 0 --min-repeat-size 5 --min-repeat-entropy 0 '
>>>