regex true wildcard?

[resnak]

I'm trying to write a perl script to process a database field that keeps the date that a record was saved in an html string preceded by a comment entered by a user at that time. The problem is that the user could possibly enter absolutely any character and I need to write a regular expression that would alow for zero or more of truly any character including a newline character. So far I've got a character class:

[\s\w,'\.\\\{\}\[\]\(\)\^\$\.\|\*\+\?\/-]*

...that, so far, works for the match but I can't believe there isn't a true wildcard that would match absolutely any character making the regular expression less complex. Does anyone know of an easier way to do this?

Justin

Dyslexics of the world: Untie!

 

[KevinADC]

to match zero or more of any character use '.*', to also match a newline use the "s" operator:

my $string = "\n";
print "true" if $string =~ /.*/s;

 

[resnak]

That sounds like it would work, and, now that I look back through the perlretut tutorial I can't believe I missed it before. But, I can't really test it until tomorrow. I'll try it and let you know what happens. Thank you for your suggestion!

Justin

Dyslexics of the world: Untie!