抓住重复 - PHP中的字母 - 正则表达式

Question

I need to look at a string, and find - character that is used more than 1 time

$input = "stack-overflow - 2014 - new" //Contains repeated character - more than 2 times

I found all sorts of really close answers already, but not quite. Is there a PHP regular expression to catch this case? (I have a basic regexp knowledge but this is too much for me)

$regex=' '; //// that what i need
if (preg_match('/(\w)\1{5,}/', $input)) {
 # Successful match
} else {
 # Match attempt failed
}

Answer 1

Regex is not the best choice to count the occurrence in a string. For PHP, there exists a method called substr_count()

e.g.

$s = 'stack-overflow - 2014 - new';
if (substr_count($s, '-') >= 2) {
    // at least 2 times
}