PHP Regex Remove Periods That Appear Next to Each Other

Question

I am working with a body of text that sometimes includes periods that occur right next to each other. Example:
Today is a nice day....."It is almost time for lunch"..
How can I turn that into this:
Today is a nice day. "It is almost time for lunch".

I have tried using $_input = preg_replace("/.+/",".",$_input); but this seems to remove everything except a bunch of periods, which it leaves there.

Any help at all is appreciated, Thanks!

Answer 1

The . character is a meta character in regular expressions meaning "match any character except newline (by default)". So if you want to match a literal period you need to escape it in your regex:

$_input = preg_replace("/\.+/",".",$_input);