Replace consecutive characters with same single character

Question

I was just wondering if there is a simple way of doing this. i.e. Replacing the occurrence of consecutive characters with the same character.

For eg: - if my string is \

Answer 1

This should do it:

var regex = new Regex("(.)\\1+");
var str = "something likeeeee!! tttthhiiissss";

Console.WriteLine(regex.Replace(str, "$1")); // something like! this

The regex will match any character (.) and \\1+ will match whatever was captured in the first group.