Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!lll-winken!uunet!mcvax!hp4nl!ruuinf!piet
From: piet@ruuinf (Piet van Oostrum)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs
Subject: Re: Matching multiple lines with regex
Message-ID: <1200@ruuinf.UUCP>
Date: 16 Mar 89 08:33:10 GMT
References: <768@pcsbst.UUCP>
Sender: piet@ruuinf.UUCP
Reply-To: piet@ruuinf (Piet van Oostrum)
Organization: Dept of Computer Science, University of Utrecht, Holland
Lines: 22
In-reply-to: jkh@pcsbst.UUCP (jkh)

In article <768@pcsbst.UUCP>, jkh@pcsbst (jkh) writes:
 `
 `I'm using the regex code out of 18.52 and would like to construct a
 `regular expression that will match *all* of the characters in a string
 `of text containing newlines. I tried ".*" (the most obvious), but it
 `just matches up to the first newline.

The definition of '.' in r.e's is any character except newline:

`. (Period)'     
     is a special character that matches any single character except a
     newline.  Using concatenation, we can make regular expressions like
     `a.b' which matches any three-character string which begins with `a'
     and ends with `b'.

So use (in Lisp syntax):

	"\\(.\\|\n\\)*"
-- 
Piet van Oostrum, Dept of Computer Science, University of Utrecht
Padualaan 14, P.O. Box 80.089, 3508 TB Utrecht, The Netherlands
Telephone: +31-30-531806. piet@cs.ruu.nl (mcvax!hp4nl!ruuinf!piet)