Why doesn't Pattern.MULTILINE match new lines in java regex

Question

enter code hereI don't understand how to capture multiple lines with simple regex:

Pattern pattern2 = Pattern.compile("^.*$", Pattern.MULTILINE);
matcher = pattern
        .matcher("11-41 pm, Oct 20, 2014 - Stef G: Ik zal er ook zij \n ttrrttttkkk");

matcher.find();
System.out.println("group=" + matcher.group());

It outputs:

group=11-41 pm, Oct 20, 2014 - Stef G: Ik zal er ook zij

In output, text after carrage return is missing.

How to avoid this?

Because the multiline option doesn't take in account newlines. — Casimir et Hippolyte, Feb 24 '15 at 08:50
"When in MULTILINE mode **$ matches just before a line terminator** or the end of the input sequence." Can you simply remove the $ and allow it to greedily match everything? — Andy Turner, Feb 24 '15 at 09:03
No vks. It's my fault. With DOTALL option I can match new lines by a dot `.` — Volodymyr Levytskyi, Feb 24 '15 at 09:05

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 24 '15 at 09:04

The DOTALL option should definitely work for you:

Pattern pattern2 = Pattern.compile("^.*$", Pattern.DOTALL);

But if it doesn't for some reason you can specify the option in the actual expression like so:

Pattern pattern2 = Pattern.compile("(?s)^.*$");

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:20

I think that the main reson of this is that you're using the $ symbol in your regex, as it states for an end of a string or, if multiline enabled, for an end of a line. So you simply find the text from the start of a string till the first end of a line in matching text.

I think that the regex in a form of ^.*$ isn't useful at all. What are you trying to achieve? Select whole text - so use .*. If you want to get some text from second line, try to do this:

^.*$.*$

Or try to get your text being splitted by newline char:

String lines[] = String.split("\\r?\\n");

Why doesn't Pattern.MULTILINE match new lines in java regex

2 Answers2