How can I tell if a string repeats itself in Python?

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Here’s a concise solution which avoids regular expressions and slow in-Python loops:

def principal_period(s):
    i = (s+s).find(s, 1, -1)
    return None if i == -1 else s[:i]

See the Community Wiki answer started by @davidism for benchmark results. In summary,

David Zhang’s solution is the clear winner, outperforming all others by at least 5x for the large example set.

(That answer’s words, not mine.)

This is based on the observation that a string is periodic if and only if it is equal to a nontrivial rotation of itself. Kudos to @AleksiTorhamo for realizing that we can then recover the principal period from the index of the first occurrence of s in (s+s)[1:-1], and for informing me of the optional start and end arguments of Python’s string.find.

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