What potential issues can arise when trying to match patterns across multiple lines in PHP using regular expressions?

When trying to match patterns across multiple lines in PHP using regular expressions, one potential issue is that the dot (.) metacharacter does not match newline characters by default. To solve this, you can use the "s" modifier in your regular expression pattern, which allows the dot metacharacter to match newline characters as well. 

// Example code snippet to match patterns across multiple lines in PHP using the "s" modifier
$pattern = '/pattern/s';
$string = "multiple\nlines\nof text";
if (preg_match($pattern, $string, $matches)) {
    echo "Pattern matched across multiple lines.";
} else {
    echo "Pattern not found across multiple lines.";
}

Keywords

multiline patterns regular expressions preg_match_all preg_match preg_replace

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