Adding DOTALL modifier to ECMAScript regex standards

[Mathias Bynens]

> On 10 Aug 2016, at 16:02, Jake Reynolds <jreynoldsdev at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I brought up the topic of adding the DOTALL modifier to the Chrome V8 Engine here and was directed to es-discuss.  I was curious about the practicality and the want for adding a DOTALL modifier to the ECMAScript standards in the future?
> 
> For those that don't know that DOTALL modifier is a regex modifier that allows the '.' symbol to match newlines as well.
> 
> Example regex: /he[.*]?llo/
> Example search string 1: hello
> Example search string 2: he
> llo
> 
> The above regex will match the 1st search string but will not match the 2nd.
> 
> In ECMAScript the only current way to make a match like that work is to use [\d\D] which will match everything including newlines, given below.  
> 
> Current workaround regex: /he[\d\D]?llo/
> 
> The s modifier is the standard in most major languages except Javascript and Ruby.  This will allow newline matching for the . symbol.  The proposed regex is below:
> 
> Proposed new regex: /he[.*]?llo/s
> Example search string: he
> llo

Formal proposal (incl. proposed spec changes) for this feature: https://github.com/mathiasbynens/es-regexp-singleline-flag