No. The . operator is concatenating the strings of your input. It's just that your input lines still contain newlines, and these are also contained in the result string.

Again, I recommend you to revise your regular expression, to explain what it should do, and to compare that against the documentation I already linked to. You will find that your regular expression does likely not do what you think it does.

In reply to Re^3: concatenating multiple lines without using . operator by Corion
in thread concatenating multiple lines without using . operator by anonym

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