title: Regex to match 'lol' to 'lolllll' and 'omg' to 'omggg', etc
body: <p>Hey there, I love regular expressions, but I'm just not good at them at all.</p>
  
  <p>I have a list of some 400 shortened words such as lol, omg, lmao...etc.  Whenever someone types one of these shortened words, it is replaced with its English counterpart ([laughter], or something to that effect).  Anyway, people are annoying and type these short-hand words with the last letter(s) repeated x number of times.</p>
  
  <p>examples:
  omg -> omgggg, lol -> lollll, haha -> hahahaha, lol -> lololol</p>
  
  <p>I was wondering if anyone could hand me the regex (in Python, preferably) to deal with this?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks all.</p>
  
  <p>(It's a Twitter-related project for topic identification if anyone's curious.  If someone tweets "Let's go shoot some hoops", how do you know the tweet is about basketball, etc)  </p>