How to use JavaScript regex over multiple lines?

user_14455 0
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var ss= "<pre>aaaa\nbbb\nccc</pre>ddd";
var arr= ss.match( /<pre.*?<\/pre>/gm );
alert(arr);     // null

I'd want the PRE block be picked up, even though it spans over newline characters. I thought the 'm' flag does it. Does not.

Found the answer here before posting. SInce I thought I knew JavaScript (read three books, worked hours) and there wasn't an existing solution at SO, I'll dare to post anyways. throw stones here

So the solution is:

var ss= "<pre>aaaa\nbbb\nccc</pre>ddd";
var arr= ss.match( /<pre[\s\S]*?<\/pre>/gm );
alert(arr);     // <pre>...</pre> :)

Does anyone have a less cryptic way?

Edit: this is a duplicate but since it's harder to find than mine, I don't remove.

It proposes [^] as a "multiline dot". What I still don't understand is why [.\n] does not work. Guess this is one of the sad parts of JavaScript..

javascript regex
8 Answers

[.\n] does not work because . has no special meaning inside of [], it just means a literal .. (.|\n) would be a way to specify "any character, including a newline". If you want to match all newlines, you would need to add \r as well to include Windows and classic Mac OS style line endings: (.|[\r\n]).

That turns out to be somewhat cumbersome, as well as slow, (see KrisWebDev's answer for details), so a better approach would be to match all whitespace characters and all non-whitespace characters, with [\s\S], which will match everything, and is faster and simpler.

In general, you shouldn't try to use a regexp to match the actual HTML tags. See, for instance, these questions for more information on why.

Instead, try actually searching the DOM for the tag you need (using jQuery makes this easier, but you can always do document.getElementsByTagName("pre") with the standard DOM), and then search the text content of those results with a regexp if you need to match against the contents.

user_697550

Now there's the s (single line) modifier, that lets the dot matches new lines as well :) \s will also match new lines :D

Just add the s behind the slash

 /<pre>.*?<\/pre>/gms
user_63680460

[.\n] doesn't work, because dot in [] (by regex definition; not javascript only) means the dot-character. You can use (.|\n) (or (.|[\n\r])) instead.

user_2256800

[\\w\\s]*

This one was beyond helpful for me, especially for matching multiple things that include new lines, every single other answer ended up just grouping all of the matches together.

user_79151190
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