Regular expression to match any character being repeated more than 10 times

Question

The regex you need is /(.)\1{9,}/.

Test:

#!perl
use warnings;
use strict;
my $regex = qr/(.)\1{9,}/;
print "NO" if "abcdefghijklmno" =~ $regex;
print "YES" if "------------------------" =~ $regex;
print "YES" if "========================" =~ $regex;

Here the \1 is called a backreference. It references what is captured by the dot . between the brackets (.) and then the {9,} asks for nine or more of the same character. Thus this matches ten or more of any single character.

Although the above test script is in Perl, this is very standard regex syntax and should work in any language. In some variants you might need to use more backslashes, e.g. Emacs would make you write \(.\)\1\{9,\} here.

If a whole string should consist of 9 or more identical characters, add anchors around the pattern:

my $regex = qr/^(.)\1{9,}$/;

In Python you can use (.)\1{9,}

• (.) makes group from one char (any char)
• \1{9,} matches nine or more characters from 1st group

example:

txt = """1. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
2. bb
3. cccccccccccccccccccc
4. dd
5. eeeeeeeeeeee"""
rx = re.compile(r'(.)\1{9,}')
lines = txt.split('\n')
for line in lines:
    rxx = rx.search(line)
    if rxx:
        print line

Output:

1. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
3. cccccccccccccccccccc
5. eeeeeeeeeeee

. matches any character. Used in conjunction with the curly braces already mentioned:

$: cat > test
========
============================
oo
ooooooooooooooooooooooo


$: grep -E '(.)\1{10}' test
============================
ooooooooooooooooooooooo

On some apps you need to remove the slashes to make it work.

/(.)\1{9,}/

or this:

(.)\1{9,}

={10,}

matches = that is repeated 10 or more times.

use the {10,} operator:

$: cat > testre
============================
==
==============

$: grep -E '={10,}' testre
============================
==============