Question

If I have a large string with multiple lines and I want to match part of a line only to end of that line, what is the best way to do that?

So, for example I have something like this and I want it to stop matching when it reaches the new line character.

r"(?P<name>[A-Za-z\s.]+)"

I saw this in a previous answer:

$ – indicates matching to the end of the string, or end of a line if
multiline is enabled.

My question is then how do you “enable multiline” as the author of that answer states?

Answer 1

Simply use

r"(?P<name>[A-Za-z\t .]+)"

This will match ASCII letters, spaces, tabs or periods. It’ll stop at the first character that’s not included in the group – and newlines aren’t (whereas they are included in \s, and because of that it’s irrelevant whether multiline mode is turned on or off).