Okay, I see some big disadvantages to this approach.

First, the regex is very displeasing. A good way to remove duplicate letters would be: s/([a-z])\1/$1/ig) { Take advantage of capturing parens and back-references!

More seriously, however, is that your code will match on such text as "this too shall pass". How do you determine which duplicates you want to remove and which you don't? Any solution which removes the backspaces in one step and the duplicates in the second step is doomed to failure.

Here's a better approach: 

#!perl -p
s/.\cH//g;

[download]
However, that won't work properly if there are multiple backspaces in a row.

A more generic and robust solution would be to use col. (Shameless plug. :)

In reply to Re: Removing characters by chipmunk
in thread Removing characters by TStanley

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.