PHP Pattern Modifier: $ for End-of-Lines in Multi-Line Strings - php

Question

Note: See the bottom of this post for an explanation for why this wasn't originally working.
In PHP, I am attempting to match lower-case characters at the end of every line in a string buffer.
The regex pattern should be [a-z]$. But that only matches the last letter of the string. I believe this a regex modifier issue; I have experimented with /s /m /D, but nothing appears to match as expected.
<?php
$pattern = '/[a-z]$/';
$string = "this
is
a
broken
sentence";
preg_match_all($pattern, $string, $matches);
print_r($matches);
?>
Here's the output:
Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[0] => e
)
)
Here's what I expect the output to be:
Array (
[0] => Array (
[0] => s
[1] => s
[2] => a
[3] => n
[4] => e
)
)
Any advice?
Update: The PHP source code was written on a Windows machine; text editors in Windows, by convention, represent newlines differently than text editors on Unix system.
It appears that the byte-code representation of Windows text files (inheriting from DOS) was not respected by the PHP regex engine. Converting the end-of-line byte-code format to Unix solved the original problem.
Adam Wagner (see below) has posted a pattern that matches regardless of end-of-line byte-representation.
zerkms has the canonical regular expression, to which I am awarding the answer.

Answer 1

$pattern = '/[a-z]$/m';
$string = "this
is
a
broken
sentence";
preg_match_all($pattern, $string, $matches);
print_r($matches);
http://ideone.com/XkeD2
This will return exactly what you want

Answer 2

As #Will points out, it appears you either want the first char of each string, or your example is wrong. If you want the last char of each line (only if it's a lower-case char) you could try this:
/[a-z](?:\n)|[a-z]$/
The first segment [a-z](?:\n), checks to for lowercase chars before newlines. Then [a-z]$ get the last char of the string (in-case it's not followed by a newline.
With your example string, the output is:
Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[0] => s
[1] => a
[2] => n
[3] => e
)
)
Note - The 's' from 'is' is not present because it is followed by a space. To capture this 's' as well (ignoring trailing spaces), you can update the regex to: /[a-z](?:[ ]*\n)|[a-z](?:[ ]*)$/, which checks for 0 or more spaces immediately before the newline (or end of string). Which outputs:
Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[0] => s
[1] => s
[2] => a
[3] => n
[4] => e
)
)
Update
It appears the line-ending style wasn't liking your regex. To account for crazy line-endings (an other unsavory white-space at the end of the lines), you can use this (and still get the /m goodness).
/[a-z](?:\W*)$/m

Answer 3

It looks like you want to match before every newline, not at the end of the file. Perhaps you want
$pattern = '/[a-z]\n/';