Regular expression to match n times in which n is not fixed - regex

Question

The pattern I want to match is a sequence of length n where n is right before the sequence.
For example, when the input is "1aaaaa", I want to match the single character "a", as the first number specifies only 1 character is matched.
Similar, when the input is "2aaaaa", I want to match the first two characters "aa", but not the rest, as the number 2 specifies two characters will be matched.
I understand a{1} and a{2} will match "a" one or two times. But how to match a{n} in which n is not fixed?
Is it possible to do this type of match using regular expressions?

Answer 1

This will work for repeating numbers.
import re
a="1aaa2bbbbb1cccccccc4dddddddddddd"
for b in re.findall(r'\d[a-z]+', a):
print b[int(b[0])+1:int(b[0])+1+int(b[0])]
Output:
a
bb
c
dddd

Answer 2

Though I have done in Java, it will help you get going in your program.
Here you can select the first letter as sub-string from the given input string and use it in your regex to match the string accordingly.
public class DynamicRegex {
public static void main(String args[]){
Scanner scan = new Scanner(System.in);
System.out.println("Enter a string: ");
String str = scan.nextLine();
String testStr = str.substring(0, 1); //Get the first character from the string using sub-string.
String pattern = "a{"+ testStr +"}"; //Use the sub-string in your regex as length of the string to match.
Pattern p = Pattern.compile(pattern);
Matcher m = p.matcher(str);
if(m.find()){
System.out.println(m.group());
}
}
}