Java – fix malformed ellipses in strings

I want to fix malformed ellipses (...) in string

"Hello.. World.."
"Hello... World..."     // this is correct
"Hello.... World...."
"Hello..... World....."

Should be corrected to:

"Hello... World..."

The following regular expression handles any instance of 3 or more consecutive instances

line.replaceAll("\\.{3,}","...");

However, when two consecutive I don't know how to deal with this situation We can't do such a thing:

line.replaceAll("\\.{2}","...");

For example, for "...", the above code will return "...", because the regular expression will replace the first two (indexes 0 and 1), followed by the next 2 (index 1 and 2), resulting in "..." "..." = "..."

Something like this works:

line.replaceAll("\\.{2}","...").replaceAll("\\.{3,"...");

... but there must be a better way!

Solution

You can replace any of two or more groups.:

[.]{2,}

With