Sublime Text regex not detecting multiline tags

Question

I have this regex here;

\[sometag\](.*)\[/sometag\]

Which is supposed to catch text surrounded by the [sometag] tag. It works for single line information contained in these tags, like on the string [sometag]this is a bit of text[/sometag]. But it doesn't work on text that spans multiple lines, like this;

[sometag] here is more text

it spans more than one line [/sometag]

For some reason, Sublime text's regex finder won't recognize the tags across multiple lines. I want to know if this a problem with Sublime Text, a toggleable option, or just my personal incompetence with regexes.

Avinash Raj · Accepted Answer · 2019-01-18 00:00:50Z

306

At the start, use a dotall modifier (?s) to make dot to match also newline characters.

(?s)\[sometag\](.*?)\[\/sometag\]

DEMO

edited Jan 18, 2019 at 0:00

answered Sep 30, 2014 at 15:14

Avinash Raj

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5 Comments

Maurdekye Over a year ago

Thanks! Why do I have to include those extra question marks though?

Avinash Raj Over a year ago

? after * will do a non-greedy match. Consider [b]foo[/b]foo[b]bar[/b] as example. \[b\].*\[\/b\] would match the whole from the starting b to the last closing b.

Avinash Raj Over a year ago

just play with adding and removing the ? in this regex101.com/r/gI0xC3/2

cmroanirgo Over a year ago

(?s) causes the dot to also include newlines

Rafael Andrade Over a year ago

thansk god you exist. Ive always tried to do that in sublime but I could not because I though we could not use modifiers in sublime search/replace

SynCap · Accepted Answer · 2015-07-30 04:44:53Z

22

If modifying of dot's mode is inadmissible for some reasons, you may take that:

[sometag](.|\n)+?[/sometag]

answered Jul 30, 2015 at 4:44

SynCap

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2 Comments

Wiktor Stribiżew Over a year ago

Never use (.|\n)+? if you have an access to the DOTALL modifier. If you cannot use (?s) in some falvor, use [\s\S]/[\d\D]/[\w\W], but not the alternation patter suggested here. This pattern is highly inefficient and can easily lead to a timeout issue.

Cerberus Over a year ago

@WiktorStribiżew: Can you explain why it is inefficient? I always use [\s\S], but at a glance (.|\n) would seem equivalent? Is it to do with matching groups? But then (?:.|\n) would be the same?

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