Question

I’ve got a text. I want to find out if a certain part of that text is repeated three or more times and replace that by only two repetitions.

For example, in the HTML code I’m looking at, there are 3 or more <br /> in a row and I want to change that to just 2 <br /> in a row.

How can I do that?

Answer 1

Edit: As noted by Tim below, my original answer was altogether incorrect.

The correct regex for replacement would look like:

$s = preg_replace('/(.)\1{2,}/', '$1$1', $s);

It means: match any character once, then the same character (\1) at least twice more ({2,}), and replace the entire matched set with the first character, but only 2 times.

However, it might be that the above answers are probably closer to what you want.

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For posterity, my original, incorrect regex looked like: /(.){3,}/ig