Question

Note: See the bottom of this post for an explanation for why this wasn’t originally working.

In PHP, I am attempting to match lower-case characters at the end of every line in a string buffer.

The regex pattern should be [a-z]$. But that only matches the last letter of the string. I believe this a regex modifier issue; I have experimented with /s /m /D, but nothing appears to match as expected.

<?php

$pattern = '/[a-z]$/';

$string = "this
is
a
broken
sentence";

preg_match_all($pattern, $string, $matches);

print_r($matches);

?>

Here’s the output:

Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [0] => e
        )

)

Here’s what I expect the output to be:

Array (
    [0] => Array (
        [0] => s
        [1] => s
        [2] => a
        [3] => n
        [4] => e
     )
)

Any advice?

---

Update: The PHP source code was written on a Windows machine; text editors in Windows, by convention, represent newlines differently than text editors on Unix system.

It appears that the byte-code representation of Windows text files (inheriting from DOS) was not respected by the PHP regex engine. Converting the end-of-line byte-code format to Unix solved the original problem.

Adam Wagner (see below) has posted a pattern that matches regardless of end-of-line byte-representation.

zerkms has the canonical regular expression, to which I am awarding the answer.

Answer 1

$pattern = '/[a-z]$/m';

$string = "this
is
a
broken
sentence";

preg_match_all($pattern, $string, $matches);

print_r($matches);

http://ideone.com/XkeD2

This will return exactly what you want