Matching newlines in JavaScript
20th September 2004
Just a quick note: the . character in a JavaScript regular expression will never match a newline character. If you want to match any character including newlines you can use the [\s\S] character class instead, which means “any character that’s either whitespace or not whitespace”.
This differs from both Python and Perl, where regular expression flags can be used to alter the behaviour of the . character (re.DOTALL and /s respectively).
This tip courtesy of the denizens of #javascript on Freenode.
More recent articles
- Moltbook is the most interesting place on the internet right now - 30th January 2026
- Adding dynamic features to an aggressively cached website - 28th January 2026
- ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages, and download files - 26th January 2026