Find longest repetitive sequence in a string

Let's start from the end, count the frequency and stop as soon as the most frequent element appears 3 or more times.

from collections import Counter
a='fdwaw4helloworldvcdv1c3xcv3xcz1sda21f2sd1ahelloworldgafgfa4564534321fadghelloworld'
times=3
for n in range(1,len(a)/times+1)[::-1]:
    substrings=[a[i:i+n] for i in range(len(a)-n+1)]
    freqs=Counter(substrings)
    if freqs.most_common(1)[0][1]>=3:
        seq=freqs.most_common(1)[0][0]
        break
print "sequence '%s' of length %s occurs %s or more times"%(seq,n,times)

Result:

>>> sequence 'helloworld' of length 10 occurs 3 or more times

Edit: if you have the feeling that you're dealing with random input and the common substring should be of small length, you better start (if you need the speed) with small substrings and stop when you can't find any that appear at least 3 time:

from collections import Counter
a='fdwaw4helloworldvcdv1c3xcv3xcz1sda21f2sd1ahelloworldgafgfa4564534321fadghelloworld'
times=3
for n in range(1,len(a)/times+1):
    substrings=[a[i:i+n] for i in range(len(a)-n+1)]
    freqs=Counter(substrings)
    if freqs.most_common(1)[0][1]<3:
        n-=1
        break
    else:
        seq=freqs.most_common(1)[0][0]
print "sequence '%s' of length %s occurs %s or more times"%(seq,n,times) 

The same result as above.