python - Regular expression: how to match a string containing " " (newline)?

Question

I'm trying to dump data from a SQL export file with regular expression. To match the field of post content, I use '(?P<content>.*?)'. It works fine most of the time, but if the field contains the string of ' ' the regular expression wouldn't match. How can I modify the regular expression to match them? Thanks!

Example(I'm using Python):

>>> re.findall("'(?P<content>.*?)'","'<p>something, something else</p>'")
['<p>something, something else</p>']

>>> re.findall("'(?P<content>.*?)'","'<p>something, 
 something else</p>'")
[]

P.S. Seemingly all strings with '' in the front are treated as escape characters. How can I tell regx to treat them as they are?

Answer 1

You should use DOTALL option:

>>> re.findall("'(?P<content>.*?)'","'<p>something, 
 something else</p>'", re.DOTALL)
['<p>something, 
 something else</p>']

See this.