[RESOLVED] Regex for repeating characters

[richie]

I have a form for collecting user input. One user decides to type in:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Doing this messes up my page because it stretches the page too far, and it doesn't wrap.

Is it possible to use regex for detecting such repeating characters?

Thx.
Richie.

[drew010]

you could use [man]wordwrap[/man] and set the optional 4th parameter to 1 so that it will cut long words. probably easier than trying any regular expressions to deal with it

[richie]

Yes, I thought of wordwrap, but it wouldn't serve my purpose.

The reason is that wordwrap has no knowledge of word boundaries. Rather it wraps based on number of characters per line.

Let's say I have this:

$text = '!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! today is sunday';

and I decide on 40 xters,

wordwrap($text, 40, "<br />\n");

the result would be:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! tod
ay is sunday

Anyway I wrote a javascript solution that does on-the-fly editing as the user types.

[richie]

drew010 ,

You're actually correct about using the option 4th parameter 1 to cut long words. I didn't pay attention to how wordwrap actually works.

Thanks for the help.