How can I tell if a string repeats itself in Python?

Question

I\'m looking for a way to test whether or not a given string repeats itself for the entire string or not.

Examples:

[
    \'0045662100456621004566210         


        

Answer 1

This version tries only those candidate sequence lengths that are factors of the string length; and uses the * operator to build a full-length string from the candidate sequence:

def get_shortest_repeat(string):
    length = len(string)
    for i in range(1, length // 2 + 1):
        if length % i:  # skip non-factors early
            continue

        candidate = string[:i]
        if string == candidate * (length // i):
            return candidate

    return None

Thanks to TigerhawkT3 for noticing that length // 2 without + 1 would fail to match the abab case.