I have a string like :
'hi', 'what', 'are', 'are', 'what', 'hi'
I want to remove a specific repeated word. For example:
'hi', 'what', 'are', 'are', 'what'
Here, I am just removing the repeated word of hi, and keeping rest of the repeated words.
How to do this using regex?
Regex is used for text search. You have structured data, so this is unnecessary.
def remove_all_but_first(iterable, removeword='hi'):
remove = False
for word in iterable:
if word == removeword:
if remove:
continue
else:
remove = True
yield word
Note that this will return an iterator, not a list. Cast the result to list if you need it to remain a list.
You can do this
import re
s= "['hi', 'what', 'are', 'are', 'what', 'hi']"
# convert string to list. Remove first and last char, remove ' and empty spaces
s=s[1:-1].replace("'",'').replace(' ','').split(',')
remove = 'hi'
# store the index of first occurance so that we can add it after removing all occurance
firstIndex = s.index(remove)
# regex to remove all occurances of a word
regex = re.compile(r'('+remove+')', flags=re.IGNORECASE)
op = regex.sub("", '|'.join(s)).split('|')
# clean up the list by removing empty items
while("" in op) :
op.remove("")
# re-insert the removed word in the same index as its first occurance
op.insert(firstIndex, remove)
print(str(op))
You don't need regex for that, convert the string to list and then you can find the index of the first occurrence of the word and filter it from a slice of the rest of the list
lst = "['hi', 'what', 'are', 'are', 'what', 'hi']"
lst = ast.literal_eval(lst)
word = 'hi'
index = lst.index('hi') + 1
lst = lst[:index] + [x for x in lst[index:] if x != word]
print(lst) # ['hi', 'what', 'are', 'are', 'what']
