find and replace with regular expressions

[chrispoliquin at gmail.com]

I am using regular expressions to search a string (always full
sentences, maybe more than one sentence) for common abbreviations and
remove the periods.  I need to break the string into different
sentences but split('.') doesn't solve the whole problem because of
possible periods in the middle of a sentence.

So I have...

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import re

middle_abbr = re.compile('[A-Za-z0-9]\.[A-Za-z0-9]\.')

# this will find abbreviations like e.g. or i.e. in the middle of a
sentence.
# then I want to remove the periods.

----------------

I want to keep the ie or eg but just take out the periods.  Any
ideas?  Of course newString = middle_abbr.sub('',txt) where txt is the
string will take out the entire abbreviation with the alphanumeric
characters included.