How do you use regex to remove duplicate characters?

[mistydennis]

I have a report that requires several fields to be concatenated, each separated by a semicolon. Because some of the fields are null, the values look like this:

cat; dog; ; ; ; snake; bird; ; hamster; ; ;

I want the field to look like this:

cat; dog; snake; bird; hamster

Is there a way to use regex to remove the duplicate semicolons? I'd also like to make sure the field does not end with a semicolon.

Open to other ideas if regex is not the best solution.

[vnravikumar · Accepted solution]

Hi

Try this

| makeresults 
| eval msg="cat; dog; ; ; ; snake; bird; ; hamster; ; ;" 
| makemv delim=";" msg 
| eval msg= ltrim(msg) 
| eval msg=mvjoin(mvfilter(msg!=""),";")

[mistydennis]

YES! Thank you so much!