Replace group of special character with a single character

Hello everyone,

I have a question related to regular expression. Let's say I have the following string:

str = vertcat(...
    "Whose woods |||||| these are I think I know.", ...
    "His house is in the village though;", ...
    "He will not see ||| me stopping here", ...
    "To '|' watch his woods fill up with snow.")

And I am looking for a new string as in the following:

str = vertcat(...
    "Whose woods X these are I think I know.", ...
    "His house is in the village though;", ...
    "He will not see X me stopping here", ...
    "To 'X' watch his woods fill up with snow.")

I have done this task using some hard code to find the '|' clusters and replacing by 'X'

ind = strfind(str,'|')
% ...

However, I have been checking regexp and regexprep, and I believe this is doable using one of this functions in a single line.

[Erivelton Gualter]

By the way, I also can use regexprep to replace all '|', by 'X', but I would like to replace a group of '|' by X:

expression = '[|]';
replace = 'X';
newStr = regexprep(str,expression,replace)

which returns:

str = vertcat(...
    "Whose woods XXXXXX these are I think I know.", ...
    "His house is in the village though;", ...
    "He will not see XXX me stopping here", ...
    "To 'X' watch his woods fill up with snow.")

[Walter Roberson]

Yup, but my solution changes entire groups.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

regexprep(str, '\|+', 'X')

[Erivelton Gualter]

Awesome,

Thank you.