Split a string after 1 or more occurrences of the same character

Question

I'm having trouble figuring out how to split a string into groups of identical characters. I have a few strings of rather random character groups similar to this one:

$string = 'aaabb2222eee77777';

I would like to be able to split them like so:

['aaa', 'bb', '2222', 'eee', '77777']

and then be able to count the number of characters in each set. What would be the easiest way to do this?

Answer 1

You can then iterate through the array and get the strlen() of each item:

preg_match_all('/(.)\1*/', 'aaabb2222eee77777', $matches);
$matches = $matches[0];

Array
(
   [0] => aaa
   [1] => bb
   [2] => 2222
   [3] => eee
   [4] => 77777
)