In 2018, with the ECMA2018 standard implemented in some browsers for the time being, JS regex now supports s
DOTALL modifier:
console.log("foo\r\nbar".match(/.+/s)) // => "foo\r\nbar"
Actually, JS native match-all-characters regex construct is
[^]
It means match any character that is not nothing. Other regex flavors would produce a warning or an exception due to an incomplete character class (demo), though it will be totally valid for JavaScript (demo).
The truth is, the [^]
is not portable, and thus is not recommendable unless you want your code to run on JS only.
regex = /--Head([^]*)--\/Head/
To have the same pattern matching any characters in JS and, say, Java, you need to use a workaround illustrated in the other answers: use a character class with two opposite shorthand character classes when portability is key: [\w\W]
, [\d\D]
, [\s\S]
(most commonly used).
NOTE that [^]
is shorter.