RegEx for the same character repeating N times

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am working on a log file scanner to report on hack attempts and I am using a regular expression to find occurances of signatures. In one case I want to find cases where the same character is repeated 10 times or more. For example finding a string of "NNNNNNNNNN" in the log file.

I tried the following RE among others but they all return any strings that are longer than 10 characters.

if ($_ =~ /\w{10,}/io)
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Comment on RegEx for the same character repeating N times Download Code

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Re: RegEx for the same character repeating N times by gjb (Vicar) on Dec 31, 2002 at 18:10 UTC
`/(\w)\1{9,}/` should do the trick. Hope this helps, -gjb- Update: Sorry, forgot about the "or more", so added the ','.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: RegEx for the same character repeating N times by Anonymous Monk on Dec 31, 2002 at 18:26 UTC
Thank you. That works.	[reply]
Re: RegEx for the same character repeating N times by pfaut (Priest) on Dec 31, 2002 at 18:15 UTC
Try this: `m/(.)\1{9,}/`. This should match any character followed by 9 or more occurences of itself./p> `--- print map { my ($m)=1<<hex($_)&11?' ':''; $m.=substr('AHJPacehklnorstu',hex($_),1) } split //,'2fde0abe76c36c914586c';` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]