What are the best practices for using regular expressions in PHP to filter out repeated smileys in a shoutbox?

Repeated smileys in a shoutbox can be filtered out using regular expressions in PHP by identifying patterns of consecutive smileys and replacing them with a single instance of the smiley. This can help improve the readability and cleanliness of the shoutbox messages. 

// Input message with repeated smileys
$message = "Hello!! How are you? :):):)";

// Remove repeated smileys using regular expressions
$filtered_message = preg_replace('/(:\)+)/', ':)', $message);

// Output filtered message
echo $filtered_message;

Keywords

regular expressions PHP filter smileys shoutbox

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