How do I match any character across multiple lines in a regular expression?

Try this:

((.|\n)*)<FooBar>

It basically says "any character or a newline" repeated zero or more times.

It depends on the language, but there should be a modifier that you can add to the regex pattern. In PHP it is:

/(.*)<FooBar>/s

The s at the end causes the dot to match all characters including newlines.

We can also use

(.*?\n)*?

to match everything including newline without being greedy.

This will make the new line optional

(.*?|\n)*?

"." normally doesn't match line-breaks. Most regex engines allows you to add the S-flag (also called DOTALL and SINGLELINE) to make "." also match newlines. If that fails, you could do something like [\S\s].

Note that (.|\n)* can be less efficient than (for example) [\s\S]* (if your language's regexes support such escapes) and than finding how to specify the modifier that makes . also match newlines. Or you can go with POSIXy alternatives like [[:space:][:^space:]]*.

Use:

/(.*)<FooBar>/s

The s causes dot (.) to match carriage returns.

In notepad++ you can use this

<table (.|\r\n)*</table>

It will match the entire table starting from

You can make it greedy, using the following, that way it will match the first, second and so forth tables and not all at once

<table (.|\r\n)*?</table>

Generally, . doesn't match newlines, so try ((.|\n)*)<foobar>.

Solution:

Use pattern modifier sU will get the desired matching in PHP.

Example:

preg_match('/(.*)/sU', $content, $match);

Sources:

• Pattern Modifiers

In JavaScript you can use [^]* to search for zero to infinite characters, including line breaks.

$("#find_and_replace").click(function() {
  var text = $("#textarea").val();
  search_term = new RegExp("[^]*<Foobar>", "gi");;
  replace_term = "Replacement term";
  var new_text = text.replace(search_term, replace_term);
  $("#textarea").val(new_text);
});

<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.3.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
<button id="find_and_replace">Find and replace</button>
<br>
<textarea ID="textarea">abcde
fghij&lt;Foobar&gt;</textarea>

In the context of use within languages, regular expressions act on strings, not lines. So you should be able to use the regex normally, assuming that the input string has multiple lines.

In this case, the given regex will match the entire string, since "<FooBar>" is present. Depending on the specifics of the regex implementation, the $1 value (obtained from the "(.*)") will either be "fghij" or "abcde\nfghij". As others have said, some implementations allow you to control whether the "." will match the newline, giving you the choice.

Line-based regular expression use is usually for command line things like egrep.

I had the same problem and solved it in probably not the best way but it works. I replaced all line breaks before I did my real match:

mystring = Regex.Replace(mystring, "\r\n", "")

I am manipulating HTML so line breaks don't really matter to me in this case.

I tried all of the suggestions above with no luck. I am using .NET 3.5 FYI.

Try: .*\n*.*<FooBar> assuming you are also allowing blank newlines. As you are allowing any character including nothing before <FooBar>.

I wanted to match a particular if block in Java:

   ...
   ...
   if(isTrue){
       doAction();

   }
...
...
}

If I use the regExp

if \(isTrue(.|\n)*}

it included the closing brace for the method block, so I used

if \(!isTrue([^}.]|\n)*}

to exclude the closing brace from the wildcard match.

Typically searching for three consecutive lines in PowerShell, it would look like:

$file = Get-Content file.txt -raw

$pattern = 'lineone\r\nlinetwo\r\nlinethree\r\n'     # "Windows" text
$pattern = 'lineone\nlinetwo\nlinethree\n'           # "Unix" text
$pattern = 'lineone\r?\nlinetwo\r?\nlinethree\r?\n'  # Both

$file -match $pattern

# output
True

Bizarrely, this would be Unix text at the prompt, but Windows text in a file:

$pattern = 'lineone
linetwo
linethree
'

Here's a way to print out the line endings:

'lineone
linetwo
linethree
' -replace "`r",'\r' -replace "`n",'\n'

# Output
lineone\nlinetwo\nlinethree\n

This works for me and is the simplest one:

(\X*)<FooBar>

Option 1

One way would be to use the s flag (just like the accepted answer):

/(.*)<FooBar>/s

Demo 1

Option 2

A second way would be to use the m (multiline) flag and any of the following patterns:

/([\s\S]*)<FooBar>/m

or

/([\d\D]*)<FooBar>/m

or

/([\w\W]*)<FooBar>/m

Demo 2

RegEx Circuit

jex.im visualizes regular expressions: