matching any character including newlines in a Python regex subexpression, not globally
To match a newline, or "any symbol" without re.S
/re.DOTALL
, you may use any of the following:
[\s\S]
[\w\W]
[\d\D]
The main idea is that the opposite shorthand classes inside a character class match any symbol there is in the input string.
Comparing it to (.|\s)
and other variations with alternation, the character class solution is much more efficient as it involves much less backtracking (when used with a *
or +
quantifier). Compare the small example: it takes (?:.|\n)+
45 steps to complete, and it takes [\s\S]+
just 2 steps.