How can I remove repeated characters in a string with R?

Question

I would like to implement a function with R that removes repeated characters in a string. For instance, say my function is named removeRS, so it is

Answer 1

I think you should pay attention to the ambiguities in your problem description. This is a first stab, but it clearly does not work with "Good Luck" in the manner you desire:

removeRS <- function(str) paste(rle(strsplit(str, "")[[1]])$values, collapse="")
removeRS('Buenaaaaaaaaa Suerrrrte')
#[1] "Buena Suerte"

Answer 2

Since you want to replace letters that appear AT LEAST 3 times, here is my solution:

gsub("([[:alpha:]])\\1{2,}", "\\1", "Buennaaaa Suerrrtee")
#[1] "Buenna Suertee"

As you can see the 4 "a" have been reduced to only 1 a, the 3 r have been reduced to 1 r but the 2 n and the 2 e have not been changed. As suggested above you can replace the [[:alpha:]] by any combination of [a-zA-KM-Z] or similar, and even use the "or" operator | inside the squre brackets [y|Q] if you want your code to affect only repetitions of y and Q.

gsub("([a|e])\\1{2,}", "\\1", "Buennaaaa Suerrrtee")
# [1] "Buenna Suerrrtee"
# triple r are not affected and there are no triple e.

Answer 3

I did not think very carefully on this, but this is my quick solution using references in regular expressions:

gsub('([[:alpha:]])\\1+', '\\1', 'Buenaaaaaaaaa Suerrrrte')
# [1] "Buena Suerte"

() captures a letter first, \\1 refers to that letter, + means to match it once or more; put all these pieces together, we can match a letter two or more times.

To include other characters besides alphanumerics, replace [[:alpha:]] with a regex matching whatever you wish to include.