This has come up a few times recently, so a little note:

/./ will match any character—except a newline.

/[\s\S]/, /[\w\W]/ and so forth are the only way to portably match every character including newlines.

what about /./m?

/./m does not match a newline (usually—see below).

The m modifier does not alter . in any way (usually—see below).

m changes what ^ and $ match—normally they’ll match only the start and end of the string, but m alters them to also match the start and end of any line, i.e. immediately after and prior a newline.

Mnemonic: m for “multiline”.

what about /./s?

Yes, that will do what you want—unless you’re using Ruby or JavaScript.

In Ruby, the s modifier is inexplicably unused—in 1.8, it stays on the Regexp object, but in no way affects matching, and in 1.9, it doesn’t even stay on the object, it just disappears. Note that these behaviours are different to using a complete nonsense modifier, like f, which causes a SyntaxError¹.

Even more inexplicable, this feature has been rolled into m instead! So in Ruby, you can use /./m to match a newline, and you can also use /^a/m to match an a at the beginning of the string, or after any newline in the string.

In JavaScript, the s modifier is absent entirely, and it’s not rolled into anything else. Use /[\s\S]/.

Mnemonic: s for “single line” (the string is treated as one line, in a twisted sense).

conclusion

Yay, regular expressions. Be sure what you mean.

To match any character including newlines:

• In JavaScript or any other language lacking the s modifier, use /[\s\S]/.
• In Ruby, use /./m, but be aware that this also modifies ^ and $. If unsure, use /[\s\S]/.
• If you have true PCREs, you may safely use /./s.

Note that this is often what you really want—rarely do you want to explicitly match every character except newlines. If you do that on purpose, at least leave a comment to that effect, otherwise your coworkers will just assume you didn’t know what you were doing.

1. Or just gets thrown away if you use Regexp.new directly. ↩

Writers of all stripes enjoy engaging in the most cynical readings of human behavior because they think it makes them appear hyper-rational. But in fact here is a perfect example of how trying to achieve that makes you irrational. Human emotion is real. It is an observable phenomenon. It observably influences behavior. Therefore to fail to account for it when discussing coupling and relationships is the opposite of cold rationality; it is in fact a failure of empiricism.

L’Hote on Kate Bolick’s “All the Single Ladies”.

As programmers, we spend a lot of time just carting data from one place to another. Sometimes that’s the entire purpose of a program or library (data conversion whatevers), but more often it’s just something that needs to happen in the course of getting a certain task done. When we’re sending a request, using a library, executing templates or whatever, it’s important to be 100% clear on the format of the data, which is a fancy way of saying how the data is encoded.

Let’s do the tacky dictionary thing:

encoding (plural encodings)

1. (computing) The way in which symbols are mapped onto bytes, e.g. in the rendering of a particular font, or in the mapping from keyboard input into visual text.

2. A conversion of plain text into a code or cypher form (for decoding by the recipient).

I think these senses are a bit too specific—if your data is in a computer in any form, then it’s already encoded. The keyboard doesn’t even have to come into it.

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coworker: If it were a critical task, how long to get that UI up and running?
me: Probably about the same amount of time if it were non-critical, all things considered
me: Maybe a little longer
me: Stress tends to make tasks drag out

Reference.

An employee of the company who mantains Mongo, who appears to be assigned Erlang driver maintenance lately, seems to deduce that the tests fail¹, and so changes an API which has been stable for 2 years in order to “make the tests pass”, despite also changing the tests.

WAT.

1. they don’t. ↩