ustrregexra("rivera, william c..", "..", ".") returns unexpected results

[Weston Ley]

I am cleaning a variable with the names of various individuals, and sometimes names contain two periods in a row when they should only contain one. The name "rivera, william c.." is an example of this. I want to clean this string to "rivera, william c." but the command

disp ustrregexra("rivera, william c..", "..", ".")

returns "..........". Is there some escape sequence I am unaware of?

[William Lisowski]

In a regular expression, the period matches any character, so you have to escape it with a backslash for it to be taken literally.

. disp ustrregexra("rivera, william c..", "\.\.", ".")
rivera, william c.

.

[Weston Ley]

In a regular expression, the period matches any character, so you have to escape it with a backslash for it to be taken literally.

Thanks for the help William.

[Bjarte Aagnes]

disp ustrregexra("rivera, william c..", "[.]+", ".")

https://www.regular-expressions.info/charclass.html
https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/us...racter-classes