Use of compile flags in regular expressions.

[Steven W. Orr]

I have a problem that I'm solving using a regex. (Yeah, I know, now I have two 
problems...) ;-)>

Anyways, the regex is about a couple of pages long and it works just peachy. 
There's just one thing I'd like to do to make it more elegant.

I need to compile the regex with MULTILINE and DOTALL. But there are a few 
sections where I wish it was *not* compiled with DOTALL. For those cases, I 
use (something like)

[^\n]*

instead of

.*

I see that I can use the (?MS) construct but I also see that it applies 
globally and not to the subgroup that I'm using it in.

* Is there a way to make it apply locally to a subgroup?
* If not, is there another way?
* Also, is this an incredible stroke of genius that I came up with this idea 
of applying flags to a subgroup, or have others thought of this too and found 
out that it's not really a good idea?

TIA

-- 
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steveo at syslang.net