re.DOTALL enabled all the time?

I was trying to help someone understand matching across newlines with . and
came across something strange.  Best I can tell, it looks like re.DOTALL is
always active.

>>> mytext = r'ab<c. de fg<hMOD3876Xi\nj>klmnop\nqr. st>uvwxyz'
>>> mytext
'ab<c. de fg<hMOD3876Xi\\nj>klmnop\\nqr. st>uvwxyz'
>>> print(mytext)
ab<c. de fg<hMOD3876Xi\nj>klmnop\nqr. st>uvwxyz
>>> import re
>>> match = re.search('<.*?>',mytext)
>>> match
<re.Match object; span=(2, 26), match='<c. de fg<hMOD3876Xi\\nj>'>

I would have expected this to fail to match because a . should not match a newline and never find seriously >


A few questions:
if re.DOTALL is baked in somehow, how do you disable it?  Setting re.NOFLAG doesn't do it
is there a way to see what flags were used in a match/search?
when did this behavior change?

-- 
David Rock
[email protected]
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