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

Question

In java, which regular expression can be used to replace these, for example:

before: aaabbb after: ab

before: 14442345 after: 142345

thanks!

Answer 1

In perl

s/(.)1+/$1/g;

Does the trick, I assume if java has perl compatible regexps it should work too.

Edit: Here is what it means

s {
    (.)  # match any charater ( and capture it )
    1   # if it is followed by itself 
    +    # One or more times
}{$1}gx;  # And replace the whole things by the first captured character (with g modifier to replace all occurences)

Edit: As others have pointed out, the syntax in Java would become

original.replaceAll("(.)\1+", "$1");

remember to escape the 1