Re: Counting number of characters without spaces between them?

Hi, Friday, April 23, 2004, 11:50:56 PM, you wrote: RD> Hi all, RD> It's a warm sunny day and I'm trying to wrap my head around the RD> following: RD> I want to be able to check to see if, in a string, the user has RD> entered too many consecutive characters and not enough spaces. For RD> example they might enter a subject like: RD> "hello world!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! how arrrrrrrrrrrrrrre you today?????!!" RD> Does anyone have a nice technique for checking the following: RD> 1) Count the length of the words in the string, i.e. if there are any RD> words beyond say 20 characters then I need to know what they are so I RD> can flag up a warning. RD> 2) Count the number of punctuation characters vs. alphanumerics - I RD> don't want the exclamation mark syndrome shown above, so I need to set RD> a friendly trade-off limit somehow. RD> Any thoughts appreciated. RD> -- RD> Best regards, RD> Richard Davey RD> http://www.phpcommunity.org/wiki/296.html You could try something like this $string = "hello world!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! how arrrrrrrrrrrrrrre you today?????!!"; if(preg_match_all('/(\w)\1{4,}|(\W)\2{4,}/',$string,$match)){ echo "too many repeated characters<br>"; print_r($match); } That will catch everything, except numbers, that is repeated 4 or more times. -- regards, Tom