Re: RE for any text, including white space

[PJ Weisberg <pjweisberg@gmail.com>]

On 3/16/11, ken <gebser@mousecar.com> wrote:
> What's the RE for any text, white space included?  I also want to grab
> (for match-string...) this text.  The text is bounded by known
> characters.  E.g.,
>
> <h3>Any Text-- <a name="thisname">
> Hot Stuff</h3
>>
>
> In the above, how to grab the text of the title, i.e., everything
> between <h3> and </h3>?  Conceivably this title text might contain
> *anything* except "</[Hh]{1-9]".
>

If A and B are your start and end points, then you want:

"A\\(.\\|\n\\)*?B"

You probably got thrown off by the fact that '.' matches anything
EXCEPT a newline.  Regexps are usually assumed to be line-based.

The '?' is there to make the '*' non-greedy, to prevent it from
matching everything between the first A and the last B in the whole
buffer.

The double '\'s are necessary in lisp code because it's interpreted as
a string before it's passed to the regexp engine.

-PJ