Question

In converting text from a word doc, the original author used a line of periods
Friends and family......................................-1
XBox 360 ................................................-2
I want to get rid of long lines of consecutive periods. I want to keep sentences that use periods intact. So I do not want to remove all periods, just when they appear in groups of 3 or more.

Answer 1

Use a regular expression:

import re

consequitivedots = re.compile(r'\.{3,}')
consequitivedots.sub('', inputstring)

Demonstration:

>>> import re
>>> consequitivedots = re.compile(r'\.{3,}')
>>> inputstring = '''\
... Friends and family......................................-1
... XBox 360 ................................................-2
... '''
>>> consequitivedots.sub('', inputstring)
'Friends and family-1\nXBox 360 -2\n'
>>> print consequitivedots.sub('', inputstring)
Friends and family-1
XBox 360 -2