How to Make the Dot (.) Match Newlines in Regular Expressions?

Mary-Kate Olsen
Release: 2024-10-31 13:10:02
Original
426 people have browsed it

How to Make the Dot (.) Match Newlines in Regular Expressions?

Using Regular Expressions to Make Dot Match Newline Characters

In regular expressions, the dot (.) can match any character except for newlines. However, sometimes you might want to match newlines as well.

To achieve this, you can use the DOTALL modifier (/s). It makes the dot match all characters, including newlines.

For example, the following regular expression won't match newlines:

/<div>(.*)</div>/
Copy after login

To make it match newlines, add the DOTALL modifier:

/<div>(.*)</div>/s
Copy after login

However, this might not be ideal if you want a non-greedy match. Instead, you can use a non-greedy match:

/<div>(.*?)</div>/s
Copy after login

Alternatively, if there aren't other tags, you can match everything except '<' characters:

/<div>([^<]*)</div>/
Copy after login

It's also worth noting that you don't necessarily need to use '/' as the delimiter for regular expressions. Using a different character allows you to avoid escaping the slashes in

, enhancing readability. For instance, here's how the previous regular expression would look using '#' as the delimiter:

#<div>([^<]*)</div>#
Copy after login

Nevertheless, it's important to be aware that these solutions may fail in the presence of nested divs, extra whitespace, HTML comments, and other complexities. HTML is quite intricate, so it's often more suitable to use an HTML parser for such tasks.

The above is the detailed content of How to Make the Dot (.) Match Newlines in Regular Expressions?. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!

source:php.cn
Statement of this Website
The content of this article is voluntarily contributed by netizens, and the copyright belongs to the original author. This site does not assume corresponding legal responsibility. If you find any content suspected of plagiarism or infringement, please contact admin@php.cn
Latest Articles by Author
Popular Tutorials
More>
Latest Downloads
More>
Web Effects
Website Source Code
Website Materials
Front End Template
About us Disclaimer Sitemap
php.cn:Public welfare online PHP training,Help PHP learners grow quickly!