How to? remove adjacent common chars

[samintz]

Is there a simple way to compress a string by reducing the common adjacent characters to a single character? For example a path string with multiple ;;;; reduced to a single ;.

Or multiple spaces reduced to a single space.

SIMPLE being the operative word here.

-Scott

 

[JohnQSmith]

Regex replace

(.){2,}

with

\1

Edit: OK. That didn't work as great in practice as it sounded in my head. I'm still working on it.
Edit: Here's an updated search string.

(.)\1+

Edit: Here's an example using sed

set | sed -r -e "s/(.)\1+/\1/g"

Edit: Make sure to replace the "(.)" with something like "([; ])" or whatever characters you're actually wanting to replace or you'll end up taking out other characters that you want to keep.

 

[samintz]

Since this is kind of a one-off need, I just used this:

do while %@index[%newp,;;] != -1 (set newp=%@replace[;;,;,%newp])