Regex: Remove more than 2 consecutive <br>?

August 15, 2024

In a string, I would like to replace any occurrences of:

<br /><br /><br /> (or more)

with:

<br /><br />

This has worked for replacing 2 or more consecutive occurrences of the letter e with an asterisk:

Dim strInput As String = "Thee brown fox jumped over the lazy dog."
Label1.Text = Regex.Replace(strInput, "e{2,}", "*")

Giving:

Th* brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

These regex haven’t worked for replacing two or more consecutive occurrences of the HTML breaks with an asterisk:

Dim strInput As String = "Thee <br /><br /><br /> brown fox jumped over the lazy dog."
Label1.Text = Regex.Replace(strInput, "\b<br />{2,}\b", "*")
Label1.Text = Regex.Replace(strInput, "\b<br />\b{2,}", "*")
Label1.Text = Regex.Replace(strInput, "\b<br />\b {2,}", "*")

Can anyone please give a syntax that will work?

(I could temporarily swap out all occurrences of the HTML breaks in the string with say [HTML-Linebreak] before executing the code if that would be easier. Then I could replace them back after.)

>Solution :

Try it, it worded with me: Regex.Replace(strInput, "(<br\s*/?>\s*){3,}", "<br /><br />")

    Dim strInput As String = "Thee <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> brown fox jumped over the lazy dog."
    Console.WriteLine(Regex.Replace(strInput, "(<br\s*/?>\s*){3,}", "<br /><br />"))