RegExp.prototype.dotAll

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The dotAll accessor property of RegExp instances returns whether or not the s flag is used with this regular expression.

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Description

RegExp.prototype.dotAll has the value true if the s flag was used; otherwise, false. The s flag indicates that the dot special character (.) should additionally match the following line terminator ("newline") characters in a string, which it would not match otherwise:

  • U+000A LINE FEED (LF) (\n)
  • U+000D CARRIAGE RETURN (CR) (\r)
  • U+2028 LINE SEPARATOR
  • U+2029 PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR

This effectively means the dot will match any character on the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). To allow it to match astral characters, the u (unicode) flag should be used. Using both flags in conjunction allows the dot to match any Unicode character, without exceptions.

The set accessor of dotAll is undefined. You cannot change this property directly.

Examples

Using dotAll

js
const str1 = "bar\nexample foo example";

const regex1 = /bar.example/s;

console.log(regex1.dotAll); // true

console.log(str1.replace(regex1, "")); // foo example

const str2 = "bar\nexample foo example";

const regex2 = /bar.example/;

console.log(regex2.dotAll); // false

console.log(str2.replace(regex2, ""));
// bar
// example foo example

Specifications

Specification
ECMAScript Language Specification
# sec-get-regexp.prototype.dotAll

Browser compatibility

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See also