$re = '/[.]{2}[A-Z0-9]{2,4}:.*?(?=[.]{2}|$)/s';
$str = '..NAME: JOHN
..BDAY: 1/1/2010
..NOTE: 1. some note 1
2. some note 2
3. some note 3
..DATE: 6/3/2014';
preg_match_all($re, $str, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER, 0);
// Print the entire match result
var_dump($matches);
Please keep in mind that these code samples are automatically generated and are not guaranteed to work. If you find any syntax errors, feel free to submit a bug report. For a full regex reference for PHP, please visit: http://php.net/manual/en/ref.pcre.php