Regexp to match any character, including newline?

[Joe Fineman]

It is sometimes a nuisance that "." in a regexp does not match
newlines.  For example, I want a regexp for text in parentheses that
contains the word "and" followed (anywhere) by a date.

  (.+ and .+ [1-2][0-9][0-9][0-9].+)

works only if the expression happens to be on one line.  I have tried
[^ ] with the space replaced by an unlikely character such as ASCII
000; that seems to work in isolation, but when I substitute it for
. in the above regexp, the result misbehaves, missing all the right
matches & finding the odd wrong one.  Is there an obvious solution to
this problem?
-- 
---  Joe Fineman    jcf@TheWorld.com

||:  Look on yonder, see that eagle rise.                :||
||:  He was born on land, but he sure enjoys the skies.  :||