How do I print a string into a string in a specific location depending on user input?

Question

import re
print ("enter a long paragraph.")
para=input()
print ("what word would you like to key search?")
word=input()
count = para.count(word)
print (count)
if count == 3:
    para=para.replace(word," ")
    print (para)
final=word+para
print (final)

this is my code so far. it is printing the string before the other string, but i would like it to print whatever is contained in the string "word" ONLY at its first occurence (if the word has been repeated 3 times). How do I do so?

Answer 1

If I understood you correctly, you want the following: If a word occurs 3 times in a string input, you want to keep the first occurrence and delete all the following occurrences.

To do that, you need to split para on the first occurrence of word . You can do that the following way:

import re
print ("enter a long paragraph.")
para=input()
print ("what word would you like to key search?")
word=input()
count = para.count(word)
print (count)
if count == 3:
    before_word = para.split(word)[0]
    after_word= para.split(word, 1)[1]
    print(before_word+after_word)

Answer 2

I am also not sure what kind of output you would expect. An example user input and desired output would be helpful.

Since you are already using re, have you considered this: re.sub(word, "", para)

Also note the difference in replacement strings: " " or "". " " means you will be adding whitespaces into your paragraph.

" This is an example paragraph, to serve as an example to this example."

Would result in:

"This is an example paragraph, to serve as an to this."