(Python) How do I remove all adjacent substrings in a string and keep only the first occurrence?-CodePudding

I've seen similar questions to this but unfortunately I couldn't find the exact case for my problem. What I was looking to do is remove all adjacent occurrences of a set substring but keep the first occurrence.

For example, given

s = "USER USER some words USER USER USER words"
substring = "USER"

The output I want would be

"USER some words USER words"

I've tried using sub(), split() but I couldn't find the answer I wanted. Would appreciate any help, thank you.

CodePudding user response：

Try re:

import re

s = "USER USER some words USER USER USER words"
substring = "USER"

s = re.sub(fr"({re.escape(substring)})(\s \1) ", substring, s)
print(s)

Prints:

USER some words USER words

CodePudding user response：

The old way would be to use a basic for loop:

string = "USER USER some words USER USER USER words"
substring = "USER"

newstring = []
s_old = ""
for s in string.split(" "):
    if (s!=s_old) or (s!=substring):
        newstring.append(s)
    s_old = s

print(" ".join(newstring))