I feel I am having the most difficulty explaining this well enough for a search engine to pick up on what I'm looking for. The behavior is essentially this:

string = "aaaaaaaaare yooooooooou okkkkkk"

would become "aare yoou okk", with the maximum number of repeats for any given character is two.

Matching the excess duplicates, and then re.sub -ing it seems to me the approach to take, but I can't figure out the regex statement I need.

The only attempt I feel is even worth posting is this - (\w)\1{3,0}

Which matched only the first instance of a character repeating more than three times - so only one match, and the whole block of repeated characters, not just the ones exceeding the max of 2. Any help is appreciated!

CodePudding user response：

The regexp should be (\w)\1{2,} to match a character followed by at least 2 repetitions. That's 3 or more when you include the initial character.

The replacement is then \1\1 to replace with just two repetitions.

string = "aaaaaaaaare yooooooooou okkkkkk"
new_string = re.sub(r'(\w)\1{2,}', r'\1\1', string)