Replacing multiple occurences of a character in a string with python

Question

I need to replace words like goooooooooooood with good. For this i tried

t.replace(r'(.)\2+',r'\2') 

where t is some word like gooooooooooood

but this doesn't work.

Answer 1

What you are looking for is a spell checker. There are multiple ways of doing it but few ways I found useful is

• Fuzzy Wuzzy
• Difflib.SequenceMatcher.find_longest_match
• Spell Checker using Probability
• PyEnchant

Answer 2

You can use itertools.groupby() :

In [53]: strs="goooooooooooood"

In [54]: from itertools import groupby

In [55]: "".join(k*2 if len(list(g))>=2 else k for k,g in groupby(strs))
Out[55]: 'good'

Answer 3

Regex solution

import re

s = "goooooooooooooood"
print re.sub(r'(.)\1{2,}', r'\1', s)

or

print re.sub(r'(.)\1{3,}', r'\1\1', s)

To replace gooooooooooood with good