PHP Regex Any Character

Question

The . character in a php regex accepts all characters, except a newline. What can I use to accept ALL characters, including newlines?

Answer 1

The PHP Manual page for Dot states that:

If the PCRE_DOTALL option is set, then dots match newlines as well.

Answer 2

An important thing is missing here. [\s\S] matches one character, whereas a newline can be a character sequence. (Windows uses two characters: \r\n.) Neither . (with DOT_ALL modifier) nor [\s\S] will match the newline sequence. Best way to match any character or any newline is (.|\R), "everything except a newline or a newline". \R matches \n, \r and \r\n.

Answer 3

It's the the . character that means "every character" (edit: OP edited). And you need to add the option s to your regexp, for example :

preg_match("`(.+)`s", "\n");

Answer 4

This is commonly used to capture all characters:

[\s\S]

You could use any other combination of "Type-X + Non-Type-X" in the same way:

[\d\D]
[\w\W]

but [\s\S] is recognized by convention as a shorthand for "really anything".

You can also use the . if you switch the regex into "dotall" (a.k.a. "single-line") mode via the "s" modifier. Sometimes that's not a viable solution (dynamic regex in a black box, for example, or if you don't want to modify the entire regex). In such cases the other alternatives do the same, no matter how the regex is configured.

Answer 5

would

[.\n]+

not work?

How about (.|\n)+? I tested it and it seems to work.

I am quite sure this is the literal interpretation of exactly what you were asking for.