Question: I'm developing an app using Apache Cordova for Visual Studio. The purpose of this app is to take a picture using the phone and upload this picture alongside with some other user input data to our company's webpage, that uses a SQL-server Database to store it's data. 

So, the question is: How can I insert data to this database so I can show it on the webpage, considering that the app will be used outside of our network? So it can't be a local connection to our database!

Answer: 
If you use `\A` instead of anchor `^` then it will fail the match:

```
# finds no match
grep -Pz -- '\A<\?xml.*\?>' file

```

This `grep` in a multiline string `^` matches at the start of every line but `\A` matches at the real start of input.
Your question is unclear, but if you want `grep` to treat all the lines as a single line, you can replace all the linefeeds in `test.txt` with spaces before passing it into `grep`, like this:

```
grep "pattern"  <( tr '\n' ' ' < test.txt)

```

Your original file will remain unaffected, the translation of linefeeds to spaces happens *"on-the-fly"*.