How to replace repeated instances of a character with a single instance of that character in python

Question

I want to replace repeated instances of the \"*\" character within a string with a single instance of \"*\". For example if the string is \"*

Answer 1

without regexp you can use general repeating element removal with checking of '*':

source = "***abc**dee*fg******h"
target = ''.join(c for c,n in zip(source, source[1:]+' ') if  c+n != '**')
print target