Regular expression to match any character being repeated more than 10 times

user_113141 0
Viewed 186575

I'm looking for a simple regular expression to match the same character being repeated more than 10 or so times. So for example, if I have a document littered with horizontal lines:

=================================================

It will match the line of = characters because it is repeated more than 10 times. Note that I'd like this to work for any character.

regex
8 Answers

PHP's preg_replace example:

$str = "motttherbb fffaaattther";
$str = preg_replace("/([a-z])\\1/", "", $str);
echo $str;

Here [a-z] hits the character, () then allows it to be used with \\1 backreference which tries to match another same character (note this is targetting 2 consecutive characters already), thus:

mother father

If you did:

$str = preg_replace("/([a-z])\\1{2}/", "", $str);

that would be erasing 3 consecutive repeated characters, outputting:

moherbb her

user_11681560

A slightly more generic powershell example. In powershell 7, the match is highlighted including the last space (can you highlight in stack?).

'a b c d e f ' | select-string '([a-f] ){6,}'

a b c d e f
user_66549420
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