Regex: Char-class equivalent for [^]

LanX has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I read once that JS-regexes follow the standards of Perl4.

Now I was quite surprised to learn that JS doesn't have a /s single-line modifier to let '.' also match on linebreaks like \n.

As a compensation JS offers to use [^] to match everything (the negation of nothing is everything).

>>> "a <\n \n> z".match('<[^]*>')
["<\n \n>"]
[download]

I like the concept and was wondering if there is any equivalent in Perl ...

Here [^] is a syntax error because at this position Perl magically expects ']' to be part of the negated char-class and still expects another closing ']'.

The closest that I was able to find was (?:.|\n)

  DB<118> "a <\n \n> z" =~ /<(?:.|\n)*>/  ; $ &
 => "<\n \n>"
[download]

Any other suggestions?

Cheers Rolf

Update

Another option is to use single-line locally: (see perlrecharclass)

  DB<146> "a <\n \n> z" =~ /<(?s:.)*>/;$ &
 => "<\n \n>"
[download]

not shorter but cleaner!

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