  We describe the statistics of repetition times of a string of symbols in a
stochastic process. Denote by T(A) the time elapsed until the process spells
the finite string A and by S(A) the number of consecutive repetitions of A. We
prove that, if the length of the string grows unbondedly, (1) the distribution
of T(A), when the process starts with A, is well aproximated by a certain
mixture of the point measure at the origin and an exponential law, and (2) S(A)
is approximately geometrically distributed. We provide sharp error terms for
each of these approximations. The errors we obtain are point-wise and allow to
get also approximations for all the moments of T(A) and S(A). To obtain (1) we
assume that the process is phi-mixing while to obtain (2) we assume the
convergence of certain contidional probabilities.
