Preg help

[crankshaft]

Hi;

Well I trawled the web looking at tutorials and exapmles, but I just can't find the answer!

I want to search a string for consecutive repeated characters, but can't figure out how to do it!

In these examples both have 3 characters repeated 3 times, but I want to differentiate between abcabcabc and aaabbbccc, and look for the repeated occurence, i.e i am looking for aaa or bbb or ccc

This seems to find any string where a-z is repeated more than once which is not what I need: "/[az]{2}/"

Any ideas?

Thanx

Crankshaft

[eelixduppy]

Hello!

I would try something like this:

<?php
function repchars($string, $repeated)
{
$string = strtolower($string);
for($i = 0; $i < strlen($string); $i++)
{
  for($j = 0; $j < $repeated; $j++)
  {
    $index = $i+$j;
    if($string[$i] === $string[$index]) {
      $found++;
    }
    else { $found = 0; }
  }
if($found == $repeated) {
 $rep = substr($string, $i, $repeated);
 break;
}
else { $j=0; }
}
if($rep) { return $rep; }
else { return "No Repetition"; }
}
print repchars("aaabbbccc", 3)."<br>"; //produces 'aaa'
print repchars("aabbbccc", 3)."<br>"; //produces 'bbb'
print repchars("aabbcc", 3).<br>"; //produces 'No Repetition'
?>

Hope this helps...

Btw, the function format is: repchars(text, how many reps you are looking for)

It returns the first substring that has the amount of reps you specify.

eelix