# coding=utf8
# the above tag defines encoding for this document and is for Python 2.x compatibility
import re
regex = r"[^\s-]\K-\s{1,3}"
test_str = ("The number of spaces after the hyphen can be 1, 2 or 3 like hyphen- ated, hyphen- ated, hyphen- ated .\n\n"
"This is a text with a hyphen- ated word in the middle of the sentence. But it also has - dashes - like the ones in the second sentence. The latter should not be modified")
subst = ""
# You can manually specify the number of replacements by changing the 4th argument
result = re.sub(regex, subst, test_str, 0, re.MULTILINE)
if result:
print (result)
# Note: for Python 2.7 compatibility, use ur"" to prefix the regex and u"" to prefix the test string and substitution.
Please keep in mind that these code samples are automatically generated and are not guaranteed to work. If you find any syntax errors, feel free to submit a bug report. For a full regex reference for Python, please visit: https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html