A line terminator is a one- or two-character sequence that marks the end of a line of the input character sequence. The following are recognized as line terminators:

• A newline (line feed) character ('\n'),
• A carriage-return character followed immediately by a newline character ("\r\n"),
• A standalone carriage-return character ('\r'),
• A next-line character ('\u0085'),
• A line-separator character ('\u2028'), or
• A paragraph-separator character ('\u2029').

The regular expression . matches any character except a line terminator unless the DOTALL flag is specified.

By default, the regular expressions ^ and $ ignore line terminators and only match at the beginning and the end, respectively, of the entire input sequence. If MULTILINE mode is activated then ^ matches at the beginning of input and after any line terminator except at the end of input. When in MULTILINE mode $ matches just before a line terminator or the end of the input sequence.