If think it is common to achieve this functionality
via the Pattern.DOTALL flag.

Arne

A . inside a character class means the class can match any character
other than newline.  You can make it match newlines, too, by making
Pattern.DOTALL the second argument to Pattern.compile.

A | in a character class can match a literal |.  The nature of the
character class effectively ORs its sub-expressions, so you do not need
to specify a pipe at all unless you want to match the character |.

The characters / and s inside a character class mean the class can match
either a literal / or literal s.  To represent whitespace, use \s.

If nobody has answered your question yet, please post a complete
program, along with sample input.

You are mixing notations. The "|" means either-or outside of a
character class, but it's just the "|" character inside a character
class. (A character class is what is defined by square brackets,
"["..."]"). Also, "/s" should probably be "\s".
Use either
[.\s]
or
.|\s  (properly parenthesised: (?:.|\s) and remember that backslash
       must be escaped inside string literals),
or better yet, use the DOTALL flag to specify that "." also matches
newlines.

/L

That pattern matches only sequences that consist of
the four literal characters inside the brackets. The
dot, in particular, "loses its special meaning inside
a character class".