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

Question

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.

Asked By: Rudolph Christian Razul

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Source

Answer 1

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

Answered By: Andrej Kesely

Answer 2

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))

Answered By: knurzl

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

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