title: Regex to remove dots only after short words and not after long words
body: <p>I would like to remove dots from abbreviations in a Pandas dataframe but not if the dots are in between longer words. So 'l.t.d.' and 'ltd.' should result in 'ltd' but 'longword.' should remain the same.</p>
  <p>The regex I now have is <code>(?:\b\w{1,3})(\.)</code>. From this regex, I want to replace the result in group 1 by an empty string. How can I tell <code>str.replace(r'(?:\b\w{1,3})(\.)', '')</code> to consider only the second group?</p>