Remove repeating characters from a word using regular expressions and nltk wordnet

repeating_characters_replacer.py

import re
from nltk.corpus import wordnet


class RepeatReplacer(object):
    def __init__(self):
        self.repeat_regexp = re.compile(r'(\w*)(\w)\2(\w*)')
        self.repl = r'\1\2\3'

    def replace(self, word):
        if wordnet.synsets(word):
            return word
        repl_word = self.repeat_regexp.sub(self.repl, word)
        
        if repl_word != word:
            return self.replace(repl_word)
        else:
            return repl_word