Clojure multiline regular expression

You need to use the (?s) "dotall mode" switch.

Example:

user=> (re-find #"\d{3}.\d{3}" "123\n456")    
nil

user=> (re-find #"(?s)\d{3}.\d{3}" "123\n456")
"123\n456"

The (?m) switch is deceptively named -- it changes what the ^ and $ anchors do, allowing them to also match start-of-line and end-of-line, respectively -- which is not want you want.


Disclaimer: I'm not a Clojure programmer, but I think this problem is independent of the language.

When multi-line mode is enabled, the interpretation of the caret ^ and the dollar $ changes like this: Instead of matching the beginning and end of the entire input string, they match the beginning and the end of each line in the input string. This is - as far as I can see - not what you want/need.

What you want is for your .*s to match newlines (what they don't do by default) and this can be done by enabling the single-line mode (aka dot-all mode). So this means:

(re-find #"(?is)^<html>.*<body>.*</body>.*</html>" c))

You can also verify this on RegExr.

Tags:

Regex

Clojure