How to remove an extra dot (.) character in email address by Python?

Question

I would like to find a solution to remove an extra dot in the email address.

e.g. apple@yahoo..com ===> apple@yahoo.com

How to remove the extra dot after the word 'yahoo'?

Does this answer your question? [Remove specific characters from a string in Python](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3939361/remove-specific-characters-from-a-string-in-python) — Daniel Campos Olivares, Feb 25 '22 at 08:25
Why though? If it's to correct typos made by users, this is a hopeless quest. — Thomas, Feb 25 '22 at 08:31

Tim Biegeleisen · Accepted Answer · 2022-02-25T09:25:50.657

3

To remove duplicated dots, I would suggest a regex replace:

email = 'apple@yahoo..com'
email = re.sub(r'[.]{2,}', '.', email)
print(email)  # apple@yahoo.com

The regex pattern [.]{2,} targets two or more continuous dots, and then we replace with just a single dot.

edited Feb 25 '22 at 09:25

answered Feb 25 '22 at 08:27

Tim Biegeleisen

502,043
27
286
360

2

Perhaps there could be say 3 dots in a sequence? In that case, my answer also has this covered. – Tim Biegeleisen Feb 25 '22 at 08:37
1

instead of `r'[.]{2,}'` you also can use `r'[.]+'` for the same effect – Silver Feb 25 '22 at 08:52
@Silver not the same effect. If only one dot, we don't need to do the replacement. – Tim Biegeleisen Feb 25 '22 at 08:53
This is great because it's not limited to the domain and therefore resolves, for example, a..b@mail..com – DarkKnight Feb 25 '22 at 09:04
@TimBiegeleisen so both do give same result as "." -> "." and "....." -> "." , that same effect to me, just different detailed behavior. – Silver Feb 25 '22 at 09:11
@Silver ... my version avoids the replacement on a single dot. It is just a minor optimization. – Tim Biegeleisen Feb 25 '22 at 09:12
1

@TimBiegeleisen true, `+` is equivalent to `{1,}` but with shorter syntax. I think it worth to be mentioned to regex newbie. – Silver Feb 25 '22 at 09:21
Escaping with `[.]` is not exactly the same as escaping with `\.`, and the former is not really meant to escape characters. It's ok to use it (not a big performance issue), and it's probably optimized into `\.` by the `re` module anyways, but still in a canonical answer I would suggest escaping it properly. – jthulhu Feb 25 '22 at 09:32

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Feb 25 '22 at 08:30

0

a simple solution for that is to use the method .replace, as below

myString = "john.doe@yahoo..com"
myString.replace("..com", ".com")

edited Feb 25 '22 at 08:30

Thomas

174,939
50
355
478

answered Feb 25 '22 at 08:29

Mateus R Lima

9
1

3

What about emails which don't use the `.com` domain? – Tim Biegeleisen Feb 25 '22 at 08:31

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 25 '22 at 09:48

Based on Tim's answer: (it's more general: it replaces multiple dots in an address) To me, it's much more readable: \. matches a dot, + means "one or more times"

Anyway: to practice with regex I tstrongly suggest visiting regexr.com it has a nice test field and it explain the syntax giving also a reference

email = 'apple@yahoo..com'
email = re.sub(r'\.+', '.', email)
print(email)  # apple@yahoo.com

If you want to only check the multiple dot pattern in the second part of the address (preserve multiuple dots in the sender) you could use

email = 'dds..apple@yahoo..com'
email = re.sub(r'\.+(?=\w+$)', '.', email)
print(email)  # dds..apple@yahoo.com

here \.+ matches one or more dots, but only if followed (positive lookaround (?=<pattern>)) by a alphanumeric sequence \w+ then by the end of the string $

How to remove an extra dot (.) character in email address by Python?

3 Answers3