Yes,
. does not match newline characters (U+000d - carriage return \r, U+000a - line-feed - \n, U+2028 - line separator, U+2029 - paragraph separator) by default. And that has not changed in latest version of UltraEdit.
If
. matches newline characters or not is controlled by flag
match_not_dot_newline. That is common for all Perl regular expression implementations. Not common is to which value this flag is set by default. In UltraEdit it is set to true (as it is more secure and most often users do not want searching/replacing over multiple lines).
However, it is quite easy to control this flag by starting the search string with
(?s). This little expression at the beginning of the search string tells the
Boost regular expression library within UltraEdit to use flag
match_not_dot_newline with value false for this search/replace. See the chapter
Modifiers in
Boost documentation about
Perl Regular Expression Syntax.
A common solution for matching any character independent on flag
match_not_dot_newline is to use instead of a dot the character set definition
[\s\S] as this matches any whitespace character and any non whitespace character which means really any character.
[\w\W] matches also any character (any word character and any non word character).
