I don’t want to repeat repeat myself

Yesterday at work, a customer spotted a typo in our UI: “you can use the use the Tailscale CLI”. After the typo was fixed, I wanted to find other cases of accidentally repeated words or phrases. I used two regular expressions to search every codebase for unnecessary repetition. The first regex finds repeated words: \b([A-Za-z]+) \1\b Backfill product data from from Stripe Learn more about about inviting users Argument must be be one of host name, IP set name, IP prefix, or IP There’s a capturing group for a single word made up of letters ([A-Za-z]+), a space, then a backreference to the group. That expression is surrounded by word boundary assertions \b, which check that I’m at the start/end of a word – this avoids finding repeated character sequyences that within longer words, like “with the reason”. The second regex finds repeated phrases: \b([A-Za-z]+ [A-Za-z]+) \1\b Follow the steps in the in the "How to" section Log in to in to your account To configure federated identities…