dot(.) metacharacter in single line modifier mode

raghuprasad241 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello Monks,

I have a text file of the following format. I modified the contents of the file.

cat temp

This is little Monk and he is a sharp kid
He is on a mountain!
[download]

In the above text there are two separate lines and they are separated by a new line. I am trying to match for e.g. kid <followed by a newline> He

To accomplish this I am using the following regular expression, I am using a single line modifier when used perl should match any character for a dot(.) including new line. I am trying to capture the match to a special variable $&. My $& should print "kid<newline>He". So what am I missing here ?

perl -ne 'use v5.10; say $& if (/kid.He/s);' temp
<No output>

perl -ne 'use v5.10; say $& if (/kid/s);' temp
kid

perl -ne 'use v5.10; say $& if (/He/s);' temp
He
[download]

Appreciate all the monks for looking at this.

Comment on dot(.) metacharacter in single line modifier mode Select or Download Code

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Re: dot(.) metacharacter in single line modifier mode by raghuprasad241 (Beadle) on Mar 04, 2016 at 19:08 UTC
Sorry for troubling you monks. I figured out the answer for my stupid question. I need to read the file in the paragraph mode to get the desired result. I tried the following and it is working as expected. `perl -00 -ne 'use v5.10; say $& if (/kid.He/s);' temp kid He` [download] Thanks!	[reply] [d/l]
Re: dot(.) metacharacter in single line modifier mode by stevieb (Canon) on Mar 04, 2016 at 19:13 UTC
~~First, you're using `-e` but using `say` which won't work. For the `say` feature, you need `-E`.~~ Bah... the v5.10 was right in front of me even. Second, you're only reading one line of the file at a time (`-n`), so you'll never see the "He" on the next line. Try something like this, which slurps in the entire file all at once: `perl -E '$str=do{local($/);<>}; say $& if $str =~ /kid.He/s;' temp kid He` [download] ps. I didn't know about the `-00` flag :)	[reply] [d/l] [select]