Delete specific duplicated punctuation from string

Question

I have this string s = "(0|\+33)[1-9]( *[0-9]{2}){4}". And I want to delete just the duplicated just one ' ', like I want the rsult to look like (0|+33)[1-9]( *[0-9]{2}){4}.

When I used this code, all the duplicated characters are removed:
result = "".join(dict.fromkeys(s)).

But in my case I want just to remove the duplicated ' '. Any help is highly appreciated

Asked By: dina robert

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Source

Answer 1

A solution using the re module:

import re
s = r"(0|\+33)[1-9]( *[0-9]{2}){4}"
s = re.sub(r"\(?=\)", "", s)
print(s)

I look for all backslashes, that are followed by another backslash and replace it with an empty sign.

Output: (0|+33)[1-9]( *[0-9]{2}){4}

Answered By: Christian

Answer 2

The function you need is replace

s = "(0|\+33)[1-9]( *[0-9]{2}){4}"
result = s.replace("\","")

EDIT

I see now that you want to remove just one and not both.
In order to do this you have to modify the call to replace this way

result = s.replace("","",1) # last argument is the number of occurrances to replace

or

result = s.replace("\","")

EDIT of the EDIT

Backslashes are special in Python.

I’m using Python 3.10.5. If I do

x = "abc"
y = "ab\c"
print(len(x)==len(y))

I get a True.
That’s because backslashes are used to escape special characters, and that makes the backslash a special character 🙂
I suggest you to try a little bit with replace until you get what you need.

Answered By: chc

Delete specific duplicated punctuation from string

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