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I have this regex in Ruby: http://rubular.com/r/eu9LOQxfTj

/<sometag>(.*?)<\/sometag>/im

And it successfully matches input like this:

<sometag>
  123
  456
</sometag>

Which would return

123
456

However, when I try this in javascript (testing in chrome), it doesn't match anything. Does javascript's multiline flag mean something else?

I want to capture everything non-greedily between two given tags. How can I accomplish this in javascript using regex? Here is a Debuggex Demo

<sometag>(.*?)<\/sometag>

Regular expression visualization

This is not XML parsing.

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12

Javascript does not support multiline expressions when using . alone. You have to use [\s\S] in place of . so an example that satisfies what you want would be:

var x = "<sometag>\n\
  123\n\
  456\n\
</sometag>";

var ans = x.match(/<sometag>([\s\S]*?)<\/sometag>/im).pop();

// ans equals " 123  456"

note that you still need the m modifier.

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5 Comments

You should explain that JS doesn't have support for the . to span across multiple lines due to not having the dotall modifier.
@hwnd good point, added the description. You should edit correct answers to improve them as opposed to just downvoting them as well.
I didn't downvote your answer, just simply left the comment.
6 years later and ([\s\S]*?) is still the best solution I found. in VSCode I've had to add the \n to make it ([\s\S\n]*?)
Very good answer worked first hand for me with the 'm' modifier

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