regex to replace words with more than two consecutive characters

Question

How can I detect the presence of more than two consecutive characters in a word and remove that word?

I seem to be able to do it like this:

# example         


        

Answer 1

You can use grepl instead.

mystring <- c(1, 2, 3, "toot", "tooooot", "good", "apple", "banana")
mystring[!grepl("(.)\\1{2,}", mystring)]
## [1] "1"      "2"      "3"      "toot"   "good"   "apple"  "banana"

** Explanation**
\\1 matches first group (in this case (.) ). {2,} specifies that preceding character should be matched atleast 2 times or more. Since we want to match any character repeated 3 times or more - (.) is first occurrence, \\1 needs to be matched 2 times ore more.

Answer 2

Combine the expressions like so:

gsub("^[[:alpha:]]*([[:alpha:]])\\1\\1[[:alpha:]]*$", "", mystring)

Answer 3

An other possibility :

mystring[grepl("(.{1})\\1{2,}", mystring, perl=T)] <- ""