I am trying to replace any instances of uppercase letters that repeat themselves twice in a string with a single instance of that letter in a lower case. I am using the following regular expression and it is able to match the repeated upper case letters, but I am unsure as how to make the letter that is being replaced lower case.
import re s = 'start TT end' re.sub(r'([A-Z]){2}', r"1", s) >>> 'start T end'
How can I make the “1” lower case? Should I not be using a regular expression to do this?
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Answer
Pass a function as the repl
argument. The MatchObject
is passed to this function and .group(1)
gives the first parenthesized subgroup:
import re s = 'start TT end' callback = lambda pat: pat.group(1).lower() re.sub(r'([A-Z]){2}', callback, s)
EDIT
And yes, you should use ([A-Z])1
instead of ([A-Z]){2}
in order to not match e.g. AZ
. (See @bobince’s answer.)
import re s = 'start TT end' re.sub(r'([A-Z])1', lambda pat: pat.group(1).lower(), s) # Inline
Gives:
'start t end'