Regular expression confusion

Question

Hi,
I want to use regular expressions to parse a text data file that has the following structure:
key1=value<EOL>
key2=value<EOL>
keyn=value<EOL>
<EOR><EOL>
key1=value<EOL>
keyn=value<EOL>
<EOR><EOL>
etc.
...where <EOR> is a user specified string that defines the end of the record and <EOL> is a user defined line delimiter (i.e. \n). I use the following regular expression to extract a single line [^n]+ which returns a string upto but exclusive of the delimiter itself. I want to be able to do the same for a delimiter that is a string rather than a single character. For example I would like to extract the entire record from the file using a regular expression; that is, all the characters (including line delimiters) upto but exclusive of the <EOR> where <EOR> is a string such as "EOR".
Is there a pattern similar to [^n]+ where I could also specify a string rather than a single character?
Given the following data file (newline characters are shown for clarity)...
MAKE=FORD\n
MODEL=MUSTANG\n
YEAR=1969\n
EOR\n
MAKE=DODGE\n
MODEL=CHARGER\n
YEAR=1973\n
EOR\n
MAKE=CHEVROLET\n
MODEL=CORVETTE\n
YEAR=1977\n
<end of file>
I want to know of a regular expression that will extract an entire record such that the group() method would return, for example, the following string when applied to the start of the file:
MAKE=FORD\n
MODEL=MUSTANG\n
YEAR=1969\n

Answer 1

I might be missing the point of what you want to do here, but I would probably approach it this way (modifying alice's example.)
import java.util.regex.*;
public class Test
    public static void main(String[] args)
        String str = "MAKE=FORD\n" +
                       "MODEL=MUSTANG\n" +
                       "YEAR=1969\n" +
                       "EOR\n" +
                       "MAKE=DODGE\n" +
                       "MODEL=CHARGER\n" +
                       "YEAR=1973\n" +
                       "EOR\n" +
                       "MAKE=CHEVROLET\n" +
                       "MODEL=CORVETTE\n" +
                       "YEAR=1977\n";
          Pattern p = Pattern.compile("(.*?)(EOR|\\z)", Pattern.MULTILINE | Pattern.DOTALL);
          Matcher m = p.matcher(str);
          while (m.find())
              System.out.println();
              System.out.println(m.group(1));
}