Regex for detecting the same character more than five times?

Question

I'm trying to figure out how to write a regex that can detect if in my string, any character is repeated more than five times consecutively? For example it wouldn't detect "hello", but it would detect "helloooooooooo".

Any ideas?

Edit: Sorry, to clarify, I need it to detect the same character repeated more than five times, not any sequence of five characters. And I also need it to work with any charter, not just "o" like in my example. ".{5,}" is no good because it just detects any sequence of any five characters, not the same character.

Answer 1

This should do it

(\w)\1{5,}

• (\w) match any character and put it in the first group
• \1{5,} check that the first group match at least 5 times.

Usage :

$input = 'helloooooooooo';
if (preg_match('/(\w)\1{5,}/', $input)) {
 # Successful match
} else {
 # Match attempt failed
}

Answer 2

Correction, should be (.)\1{5,}, I believe. My mistake. This gets you:

(.)  #Any character
\1   #The character captured by (.)
{5,} #At least 5 more repetitions (total of at least 6)

You can also restrict it to letters by using (\w)\1{5,} or ([a-zA-Z])\1{5,}