Regex to match any character including new lines

If you don't want add the /s regex modifier (perhaps you still want . to retain its original meaning elsewhere in the regex), you may also use a character class. One possibility:

[\S\s]

a character which is not a space or is a space. In other words, any character.

You can also change modifiers locally in a small part of the regex, like so:

(?s:.)

Add the s modifier to your regex to cause . to match newlines:

$string =~ /(START)(.+?)(END)/s;