removing more than two consecutive chars

Question

I want to remove any char which repeats more than two times consecutive.

import re
re.sub(r'([a-z])\1+', r'\1', 'ffffffbbbbbbbqqq')

it's returning me fbq, while I need ffbbqq. The goal is pre-process the string before doing a spell checking. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

In [204]: import re

In [205]: re.sub(r'([a-z])\1+', r'\1\1', 'ffffffbbbbbbbqqq')
Out[205]: 'ffbbqq'