Re^3: How can I reduce this with a REGEX?

[hazylife]

Which can probably be further reduced to:

$ cat 1078350.in
12-12
12-12-12
12-13-12-13
12-12-13-13
12-13-13-14
$ perl -pe '1 while s/(\d\d)(.*?)(?:-\1)/$1$2/g' 1078350.in
12
12
12-13
12-13
12-13-14

[misterperl]

$ perl -pe '1 while s/(\d\d)(.*?)(?:-\1)/$1$2/g' 1078350.in thanks I like this construct, never saw it before.. You got my ++ vote...