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

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.