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Really basic question here. So I'm told that a dot . matches any character EXCEPT a line break. I'm looking for something that matches any character, including line breaks.
All I want to do is to capture all the text in a website page between two specific strings, stripping the header and the footer. Something like HEADER TEXT(.+)FOOTER TEXT and then extract what's in the parentheses, but I can't find a way to include all text AND line breaks between header and footer, does this make sense? Thanks in advance!
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The wildcard * (asterisk) can be a substitute for any number of letters, numbers, or characters. Note that the asterisk (*) works differently in grep. In grep the asterisk only matches multiples of the preceding character. The wildcard * can be a substitute for any number of letters, numbers, or characters.
In regular expressions, the period ( . , also called "dot") is the wildcard pattern which matches any single character. Combined with the asterisk operator . * it will match any number of any characters.
"*" in the shell is <any string>. In egrep it's an operator that says "0 to many of the previous entity". In grep, it's just a regular character.
Multiline option, it matches either the newline character ( \n ) or the end of the input string.
When I need to match several characters, including line breaks, I do:
[\s\S]*?
Note I'm using a non-greedy pattern
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