Just one small addition to the problem of matching any character. The /s modifier is definitely the way to go, so that . matches everything including newlines.

If for some reason you don't want to use the \s modifier - maybe you have other dots in your regex which should not match newlines - you should use a character class. The advantage over (?:.|\n) is that no backtracking has to be done.

# character class matching any one character
/[\000-\377]/

# or equivalent
/[\d\D]/
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-- Hofmator