Regexp to remove specific number of occurrences of character only

Question

In Python re, I have long strings of text with > character chunks of different lengths. One string can have 3 consecutive > char

Answer 1

You need to make sure there is no character of your choice both on the left and right using a pair of lookaround, a lookahead and a lookbehind. The general scheme is

(?

where (? means no X immediately on the left is allowed, X{n} means n occurrences of X, and (?!X) means no X immediately on the right is allowed.

In this case, use

r'(?)>{2}(?!>)'

See the regex demo.