Remove repeating character

How would I remove repeating characters (e.g. remove the letter k in cakkkke for it to be cake)?

One straightforward way to do this would be to loop through each character of the string and append each character of the string to a new string if the character isn't a repeat of the previous character.

Here is some code that can do this:

$newString = '';
$oldString = 'cakkkke';
$lastCharacter = '';
for ($i = 0; $开发者_JAVA百科i < strlen($oldString); $i++) {
    if ($oldString[$i] !== $lastCharacter) {
        $newString .= $oldString[$i];
    }
    $lastCharacter = $oldString[$i];
}
echo $newString;

Is there a way to do the same thing more concisely using regex or built-in functions?

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Use backrefrences

echo preg_replace("/(.)\\1+/", "$1", "cakkke");

Output:

cake

Explanation:

(.) captures any character

\\1 is a backreferences to the first capture group. The . above in this case.

+ makes the backreference match atleast 1 (so that it matches aa, aaa, aaaa, but not a)

Replacing it with $1 replaces the complete matched text kkk in this case, with the first capture group, k in this case.

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You want to first match a character, followed by that character repeated: (.)\1+. Replace that with the first character. The brackets create a backreference to the first character, which you use both to match the repeated instances and as the replacement text.

preg_replace('/(.)\1+/', '$1', $str);