Perl Cookbook

Matching Multiple Lines

Problem

You want to use regular expressions on a string containing more than one line, but the special characters . (any character but newline), ^ (start of string), and $ (end of string) don’t seem to work for you. This might happen if you’re reading in multiline records or the whole file at once.

Solution

Use /m , /s, or both as pattern modifiers. /s lets . match newline (normally it doesn’t). If the string had more than one line in it, then /foo.*bar/s could match a "foo" on one line and a "bar" on a following line. This doesn’t affect dots in character classes like [#%.], since they are regular periods anyway.

The /m modifier lets ^ and $ match next to a newline. /^=head[1-7]$/m would match that pattern not just at the beginning of the record, but anywhere right after a newline as well.

Discussion

A common, brute-force approach to parsing documents where newlines are not significant is to read the file one paragraph at a time (or sometimes even the entire file as one string) and then extract tokens one by one. To match across newlines, you need to make . match a newline; it ordinarily does not. In cases where newlines are important and you’ve read more than one line into a string, you’ll probably prefer to have ^ and $ match beginning- and end-of-line, not just beginning- and end-of-string.

The difference between /m and /s is important: /m makes ^ and $ match next to a newline, while /s makes . match newlines. You can even use them together—they’re not ...