Regular Expression for Multiple Same Characters

need some help

[FourDegreez]

Sometimes users will elongate words with repeating characters, ex. grrrrrr or whoaaaaaaa.

To my knowledge, there are no words in the english language where the same character repeats more than twice. So I'm looking for a regular expression that will basically strip out any repeating character beyond two repeats. So grrrrrr would become grr.

Is this possible? I'm not having any luck.

[d40sithui]

check this out. this is some pretty badass regex. wish i was the orignal author though lol

<?
$content = "grrrrrrrrrrr arggggg loooool";
$pattern = '{([a-zA-Z])\1+}';
$replacement = '$1$1'; 
echo "<br>".preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $content);

[PHP_Chimp]

$subject = 'grrrrrr and sommmmething elllse';
$pattern = '%(.)\\1+%i';
$replace = '$1';
$test1 = preg_replace($pattern, $replace, $subject);
echo $test1;

Same thing as above...just got beaten to it ;)

[FourDegreez]

Awesome, thanks guys!

[coopster]

Check text string for duplicates [webmasterworld.com]
Check string for consecutive alpha numerics [webmasterworld.com]