Full name
re.DOTALL
Library
re
Syntax
re.DOTALL
Description
The re.DOTALL search modifier forces the symbol . represent any character, including the newline symbol \n.
Parameters
The re.DOTALL search modifier takes no arguments.
Examples
In this example we start with the following text and search pattern:
text = "dogs and cats play\ndogs and cats eat"
pattern = r".dog"
pattern = r".dog"
Note that the text includes a line break:
print(text)
dogs and cats play
dogs and cats eat
dogs and cats eat
By default, the search for the regular expression will not find any matches since there is no "dog" string preceded by a character: in the first line "dog" occupies the beginning of the string and in the second it is preceded by a newline symbol which does not return a match to the symbol .:
re.findall(pattern, text)
[]
However, if the re.DOTALL argument is included, the newline symbol does return a match to the symbol .:
re.findall(pattern, text, flags = re.DOTALL)
['\ndog']
