RegExp.prototype.dotAll
Baseline Widely available
This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.
The dotAll
accessor property of RegExp
instances returns whether or not the s
flag is used with this regular expression.
Try it
Description
RegExp.prototype.dotAll
has the value true
if the s
flag was used; otherwise, false
. The s
flag indicates that the dot special character (.
) should additionally match the following line terminator ("newline") characters in a string, which it would not match otherwise:
- U+000A LINE FEED (LF) (
\n
) - U+000D CARRIAGE RETURN (CR) (
\r
) - U+2028 LINE SEPARATOR
- U+2029 PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR
This effectively means the dot will match any UTF-16 code unit. However, it will not match characters that are outside of the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP), also known as astral characters, which are represented as surrogate pairs and necessitate matching with two .
patterns instead of one.
"😄".match(/(.)(.)/s);
// Array(3) [ "😄", "\ud83d", "\ude04" ]
The u
(unicode) flag can be used to allow the dot to match astral characters as a single character.
"😄".match(/./su);
// Array [ "😄" ]
Note that a pattern such as .*
is still capable of consuming astral characters as part of a larger context, even without the u
flag.
"😄".match(/.*/s);
// Array [ "😄" ]
Using both the s
and u
flags in conjunction allows the dot to match any Unicode character in a more intuitive manner.
The set accessor of dotAll
is undefined
. You cannot change this property directly.
Examples
Using dotAll
const str1 = "bar\nexample foo example";
const regex1 = /bar.example/s;
console.log(regex1.dotAll); // true
console.log(str1.replace(regex1, "")); // foo example
const str2 = "bar\nexample foo example";
const regex2 = /bar.example/;
console.log(regex2.dotAll); // false
console.log(str2.replace(regex2, ""));
// bar
// example foo example
Specifications
Specification |
---|
ECMAScript Language Specification # sec-get-regexp.prototype.dotAll |
Browser compatibility
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