php - How to replace double/more letters to a single letter?

Question

I need to convert any letter that occur twice or more within a word with a single letter of itself.

For example:

School -> Schol
Google -> Gogle
Gooooogle -> Gogle
VooDoo -> Vodo

I tried the following, but stuck at the second parameter in eregi_replace.

$word = 'Goooogle';
$word2 = eregi_replace("([a-z]{2,})", "?", $word);

If I use \1 to replace ?, it would display the exact match. How do I make it single letter?

Can anyone help? Thanks

Answer 1

See regular expression to replace two (or more) consecutive characters by only one?

By the way: you should use the preg_* (PCRE) functions instead of the deprecated ereg_* functions (POSIX).

Richard Szalay's answer leads the right way:

$word = 'Goooogle';
$word2 = preg_replace('/(w)1+/', '$1', $word);