Greetings! Today, you will delve into handling and manipulating strings in Java, a piece of fundamental knowledge in many areas of programming. Specifically, we'll learn how to identify consecutive groups of identical characters in a string. Intrigued to enhance your skills? Without further ado, let's proceed!

In this lesson, your objective is to write a Java method that accepts a string as input and identifies all consecutive groups of identical characters within it. A group is defined as a segment of the text wherein the same character is repeated consecutively.

Your method should return a List of strings. Each string will consist of the repeating character and the length of its repetition, joined by a colon (:). For example, if the input string is "aaabbcccaae", your method should output: "a:3", "b:2", "c:3", "a:2", "e:1".

Bear in mind that, while processing the input string, we are interested only in alphanumeric characters (i.e., alphabets and digits), without differentiating the case. Other characters present will not factor into the formation of these groups.

Ready to discover how to accomplish this task? Let's set forth!

When aiming to solve a problem, it's always crucial to first establish our scope by taking preliminary steps. First, we will initialize an empty List to store our results. We will also declare two variables, currentGroupChar and currentGroupLength, which will help us monitor the character of the current group and the length of its consecutive sequence.

With the setup in place, we are now ready for the main game: processing the input string. For this, we'll create a loop to examine each character. At every step, the character is checked to see if it is alphanumeric as that is our primary interest.

As the loop executes, if a character is the same as currentGroupChar, it implies that the group is continuing, and we simply increment currentGroupLength. However, if the character differs from currentGroupChar, it signals the start of a new group.

At the start of a new group, we will add the string formed by concatenating currentGroupChar and currentGroupLength with a colon (:) to groups, and then update currentGroupChar and currentGroupLength with the new character and 1, respectively.

After the loop ends, it's important to acknowledge any leftover group that may not yet be added to groups. This can happen because a group is only added to groups when we identify a new group. To ensure we don't miss any groups, we perform a final check on currentGroupChar and, if needed, add it to groups.

Congratulations! You have now learned how to identify consecutive groups of characters in a string using Java. This skill can come in handy when analyzing text-related problems or even when preprocessing data for machine learning. To improve your grasp of the subject, you should practice similar problems. Always remember, proficiency comes through persistence and consistent effort. Now, it's time to get started with those strings!