I need to remove excessive duplicates of particular element from the list, that is, if there’s more than max_dup duplicates of selected elements in a slice of the list, leave at most max_dup elements in place. Obviously, stability (retaining order of elements in the list) is a must. E.g.

>>> remove_excessive_duplicates([1, '', '', '', 2, '', 3, '', '', '', '', '', 4, '']) [1, '', '', 2, '', 3, '', '', 4, ''] 

The code I wrote:

def remove_excessive_duplicates(lst, dup='', max_dup=2):     new_lst = []     dcnt = 0     for elem in lst:         if elem == dup:             dcnt += 1          else:             dcnt = 0         if dcnt > max_dup:             continue         new_lst.append(elem)     return new_lst 

It works, but I’m wondering if there’s some cleverer way to do it, or the one that uses logic of some Python builtins to achieve the same goal.