Question

I tried to do a search on this particular problem, but all I get is either removal of duplicate lines or removal of repeated strings where they are separated by a delimiter.

My problem is slightly different. I have a string such as

    "comp name1 comp name2 comp name2 comp name3" 

where I want to remove the repeated comp name2 and return only

    "comp name1 comp name2 comp name3" 

They are not consecutive duplicate words, but consecutive duplicate substrings. Is there a way to solve this using regular expressions?

Answer 1

s/(.*)\1/$1/g

Be warned that the running time of this regular expression is quadratic in the length of the string.