\N Never Matches Line Breaks

Perl 5.12 and PCRE 8.10 introduced \N which matches any single character that is not a line break, just like the dot does. Unlike the dot, \N is not affected by "single-line mode". (?s)\N. turns on single-line mode and then matches any character that is not a line break followed by any character regardless of whether it is a line break.

PCRE's options that control which characters are treated as line breaks affect \N in exactly the same way as they affect the dot.

PHP 5.3.4 and R 2.14.0 also support \N as their regex support is based on PCRE 8.10 or later.