How to remove repeating non-adjacent string

Given lines that look like the following:

Blah \cite[9.1173]{Joyce:1986aa}\autocite[42]{Kenner:1970ab}\autocite[108]{Hall:1960aa} bbb.\n

I’d like to remove the second (and any subsequent) occurrence of \autocite, resulting in the following:

Blah \autocite[9.1173]{Joyce:1986aa}[42]{Kenner:1970ab}[108]{Hall:1960aa} bbb.\n

I’m struggling to express this in regex form (I’m using 开发者_如何转开发the python 2.7 RE module), however, as I’m not sure how to formulate “remove only the second and subsequent occurrences of \autocite when followed by […]{…}, until a space or period is encountered”.

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Regular expressions are not a panacea.

l = s.split('\\autocite')
print '%s\\autocite%s' % (l[0], ''.join(l[1:]))

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If you absolutly want regexes you can use (?<=\\autocite)(.*?)\\autocite(.*) and replace with \1\2.

But @Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams answer is way better an efficient.