Question

This regex <li>.*end does not work for the following text, what I’m doing wrong?

text

    <li>asdsadasd
adssadasdasdasdas
asdasdasdasdasdad
adsasdasdasdasd
dasdadadsadadasdasdasdasda
end

Can someone help me write a regex to grab all the text?

Answer 1

By default, . does not match newlines. You must pass the DOTALL flag…

regex = re.compile('<li>.*end', re.DOTALL)

Or equivalently,

regex = re.compile('<li>.*end(?S)')

Edit: Not the re.MULTILINE flag — that changes the behavior of $ and ^.