Greetings! Today, you will delve into handling and manipulating strings in PHP, a fundamental skill in many areas of programming. We'll learn how to identify consecutive groups of identical characters in a string using PHP's powerful string functions. Excited to enhance your skills? Let's dive in!

In this lesson, your objective is to write a PHP function 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 where the same character is repeated consecutively.

Your function should return an array 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 function 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., letters 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 get started!

To solve the problem, we begin by initializing our necessary components. We'll set up an empty array for storing our results. Additionally, we'll declare two variables: $currentGroupChar for tracking the character of the current group and $currentGroupLength for its consecutive sequence length.