Regex detect any repeated character but with optional whitespace between

Question

So currently I've got the following regex pattern, allowing me to detect any string containing 9 characters that are the same consecutively.

/^.*(\S)\1{9,}.*$/

This works perfectly with a string like the following: this a tesssssssssst however I wish for it to also detect a string like this: this a tess sss ssssst (Same number of the repeated character, but with optional whitespace)

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You need to put the backreference into a group and add an optional space into the group:

^.*(\S)(?: ?\1){9,}.*$

See the regex demo. If there can be more than 1 space in between, replace ? with *.

The .*$ part is only needed if you need to get the whole line match, for methods that allow partial matches, you may use ^.*(\S)(?: ?\1){9,}.

If any whitespace is meant, replace the space with \s in the pattern.