Just for fun, I'll assume that I got the output from "man" and someone else has removed the backspaces for me so I want to remove the duplicates... And based on my experience, I may end up with tripled or quadrupled letters as well.

You could do pretty well by finding "words" that contain only doubled letters and modifying those. But a "good" way to do this hasn't popped into my brain yet... 

my $inWord= "[-\\w'(),]";
my $notWord= "[^-\\w'(),]";
s#($notWord)(($inWord)\3(?:$inWord)*($inWord)\4)($notWord)#
    my( $pre, $word, $post )= ( $1, $2, $5 );
    my $len= length($word);
    for(  $word =~ /(.)(\1*)/g  ) {
        $len= length($2)  if  length($2) < $len;
    }
    $word =~ s/(.)\1{$len}/$1/g    if  0 < $len;
    $pre . $word . $post;
#ge

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Like I said, that doesn't seem like a great way to do it (untested as well). :-}

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

In reply to (tye)Re: Removing characters by tye
in thread Removing characters by TStanley

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