69 – Regex multiline flag

Regular expressions have a multiline flag that can be used to change the behaviour of the special characters ^ and $. By default, ^ and $ match the beginning and end of the string, respectively; with the multiline flag, they match the beginning and end of each line, respectively.

The flag can be used inline with (?m), or passed in to the relevant functions of the module re with re.MULTILINE.

As an example, take the following string that spans across two lines:

The quick brown fox jumps over
the lazy dog.

The pattern r"^[Tt]he" will only match the first “The”, while the pattern r"(?m)^[Tt]he" will match the two occurrences of the word “the”.