Regular Expressions Regex modifiers (flags) DOTALL modifier
Example
A regex pattern where a DOTALL modifier (in most regex flavors expressed with s) changes the behavior of . enabling it to match a newline (LF) symbol:
/cat (.*?) dog/s
This Perl-style regex will match a string like "cat fled from\na dog" capturing "fled from\na" into Group 1.
An inline version: (?s) (e.g. (?s)cat (.*?) dog)
Note: In Ruby, the DOTALL modifier equivalent is m, Regexp::MULTILINE modifier (e.g. /a.*b/m).
Note: JavaScript does not provide a DOTALL modifier, so a . can never be allowed to match a newline character. In order to achieve the same effect, a workaround is necessary, e. g. substituting all the .s with a catch-all character class like [\S\s], or a not nothing character class [^] (however, this construct will be treated as an error by all other engines, and is thus not portable).
