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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-10T16:09:43+00:00

So basically we need a regex to strip excess punctuation from a string, leaving

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So basically we need a regex to strip excess punctuation from a string, leaving only one of the punctuation characters.

So:

This is my awesome string!!!!! Don’t you love it???!!??!!

Would result in

This is my awesome string! Don’t you love it?!

I have tried and tried and tried to get this, but I either end up mangling the string or it doesn’t work at all. I’m still learning Regexes so please forgive what is surely a stupid question.

I guess “punctuation” would be pretty much anything that’s not A-Za-z0-9

Edit It appears that I misunderstood our original requirements. Using the accepted solution below, how would I adjust it so that no matter what characters you have, the punctuation is limited to the first only?

IE

???!!!!!!

would become just

?

And

This is my string!!!?!?!?!? Isn’t it great???!?!?!!

would become

This is my string! Isn’t it great?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Similar to the other answers, but should take care of any non 0-9a-zA-Z characters in any order leaving you with one of each left:

    $newstring= preg_replace('/([^\w\s])(?=[^\w\s]*\1)/', '', $oldstring);

    Should turn

    This is my awesome string!!!!! Don't you love it???!!??!!

    into

    This is my awesome string! Don't you love it?!

    It works by using a positive lookahead to see if the character appears again in this string of punctuation. If it does, it’s replaced with the empty string.

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