Regex match everything between two string, spaning multiline

Question

How do I regex match everything that is between two strings? The things between two strings span several lines and can contain all html characters too.

For example:

<p>something</p>

<!-- OPTIONAL -->

<p class="sdf"> some text</p>
<p> some other text</p>

<!-- OPTIONAL END -->

<p>The end</p>

I want to strip the whole optional part off. but the greedy any character match isn't doing what I wanted.. the pattern I'm using is

• <!-- OPTIONAL -->.*<!-- OPTIONAL END -->
• <!-- OPTIONAL -->(.*)<!-- OPTIONAL END -->
• <!-- OPTIONAL -->(.*)\s+<!-- OPTIONAL END -->
• (?=<!-- OPTIONAL -->)(.*)\s+<!-- OPTIONAL END -->

All of them match the first optional tag, if only the first part is given, but doesn't do well with complete lines.

Here's an example: http://regexr.com?352bk

Thanks

Answer 1

playing with your example I think I found the answer, check this in your code:

<!-- OPTIONAL -->[\w\W]*<!-- OPTIONAL END -->

I'll hope this help

Answer 2

Check the dotall checkbox in RegExr :)

Without the dotall flag (the s in /regex/s), a dot (.) won't match carriage returns.

You should use .*? instead of .* to lazy match the optional content (see the PLEASE DO NOT MATCH! sentence in the examples).