ok, a friend of mine is taking a perl/cgi class in school and she had a problem posed to her. using perl, how do you make duplicate letters collapse to a single letter? example: let us say you have the word 'letters' it should colapse to 'leters' and 'foo' should collapse to 'fo' but 'fooo' should be 'foo' because the 3rd o isn't a duplicate... am i making myself clear? i am sure there is some neato tr// or s// that i could have used, however i am pitiful with regexp's so the best i could come up with was:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

while (<>) {
    my $temp = '';
    print join ('',
        map { 
            if ($_ eq $temp) {
                $temp = '';
            } else {
                $temp = $_;
            }
        } split('', $_)
    );
}

[download]
anyone have any better ideas? i would love to see some other cool perlish ways of doing this...

In reply to removing duplicate letters by eduardo

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