Regex to match anything

Question

I know it seems a bit redundant but I'd like a regex to match anything.

At the moment we are using ^*$ but it doesn't seem to match no matter what the text.

I do a manual check for no text but the test view we use is always validated with a regex. However, sometimes we need it to validate anything using a regex. i.e. it doesn't matter what is in the text field, it can be anything.

I don't actually produce the regex and I'm a complete beginner with them.

Does this answer your question? [Regular Expressions- Match Anything](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6711971/regular-expressions-match-anything) — Pound Hash, Oct 13 '22 at 00:33

score 42 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 19 '13 at 09:54

42

The regex .* will match anything (including the empty string, as Junuxx points out).

answered Mar 19 '13 at 09:54

RichieHindle

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And nothing, which it seems he doesn't want. So, `.+` – Junuxx Mar 19 '13 at 09:55
Checking for nothing doesn't matter too much as I'm doing that outside of the regex. I will try both though, thanks. – Fogmeister Mar 19 '13 at 09:55
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This regex does not match "\n". – twhb Jun 19 '18 at 04:22

score 36 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 25 '17 at 00:20

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The chosen answer is slightly incorrect, as it wont match line breaks or returns. This regex to match anything is useful if your desired selection includes any line breaks:

[\s\S]+

[\s\S] matches a character that is either a whitespace character (including line break characters), or a character that is not a whitespace character. Since all characters are either whitespace or non-whitespace, this character class matches any character. the + matches one or more of the preceding expression

answered Jan 25 '17 at 00:20

Vinnie James

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A slightly more concise alternative: `[^]+` – Andre Nuechter May 17 '19 at 10:47
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[^]+ is only valid in the JavaScript regex engine. It will not work with Python, PCRE, Go, etc – Vinnie James May 17 '19 at 14:52
`[\s\S]+` is working. `.*` doesn't work in javascript. – Rami Sedhom Aug 05 '22 at 14:04

score 9 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 21 '13 at 23:16

^ is the beginning-of-line anchor, so it will be a "zero-width match," meaning it won't match any actual characters (and the first character matched after the ^ will be the first character of the string). Similarly, $ is the end-of-line anchor.

* is a quantifier. It will not by itself match anything; it only indicates how many times a portion of the pattern can be matched. Specifically, it indicates that the previous "atom" (that is, the previous character or the previous parenthesized sub-pattern) can match any number of times.

To actually match some set of characters, you need to use a character class. As RichieHindle pointed out, the character class you need here is ., which represents any character except newlines (and it can be made to match newlines as well using the appropriate flag). So .* represents * (any number) matches on . (any character). Similarly, .+ represents + (at least one) matches on . (any character).

A mysterious downvote appears! Is my answer factually incorrect? TL;DR? Not quite an answer to the question as posed? *We'll never know for sure!* — Kyle Strand, Aug 26 '15 at 16:23

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 09 '16 at 08:53

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I know this is a bit old post, but we can have different ways like :

.*
(.*?)

answered Jun 09 '16 at 08:53

NG.

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Regex to match anything

4 Answers4

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