The Dot Matches (Almost) Any Character

In regular expressions, the dot or period is one of the most commonly used metacharacters. Unfortunately, it is also the most commonly misused metacharacter.

The dot matches a single character, without caring what that character is. The only exception are line break characters. In all regex flavors discussed in this tutorial, the dot does not match line breaks by default.

This exception exists mostly because of historic reasons. The first tools that used regular expressions were line-based. They would read a file line by line, and apply the regular expression separately to each line. The effect is that with these tools, the string could never contain line breaks, so the dot could never match them.

Modern tools and languages can apply regular expressions to very large strings or even entire files. Except forJavaScript and VBScript, all regex flavors discussed here have an option to make the dot match all characters, including line breaks. In EditPad Pro or PowerGREP, you simply tick the checkbox labeled "dot matches newline".

In Perl, the mode where the dot also matches line breaks is called "single-line mode". This is a bit unfortunate, because it is easy to mix up this term with "multi-line mode". Multi-line mode only affects anchors, and single-line mode only affects the dot. You can activate single-line mode by adding an s after the regex code, like this:m/^regex$/s;.

Other languages and regex libraries have adopted Perl's terminology. When using the regex classes of the .NET framework, you activate this mode by specifying RegexOptions.Singleline, such as inRegex.Match("string", "regex", RegexOptions.Singleline).

JavaScript and VBScript do not have an option to make the dot match line break characters. In those languages, you can use a character class such as [\s\S] to match any character. This character matches a character that is either a whitespace character (including line break characters), or a character that is not a whitespace character. Since all characters are either whitespace or non-whitespace, this character class matches any character.