YANRQ (yet another regex question)

[Michael George Lerner]

Howdy,

I have a regular expression that looks vaguely like this:

r = re.compile(r'''(?P<start>start)(?P<foo>   foo)(?P<end>end)''')

but the middle pattern isn't quite what I want.  I know that foo 
will be a string that is seven characters long and contains 'foo'
surrounded by spaces.  That is, it could be any of these:

'foo    '
' foo   '
'  foo  '
'   foo '
'    foo'

I'd like to rewrite my regular expression to match any of these,
and I'd really rather not write it all out like this:

(?P<foo>(foo    | foo   |  foo  |   foo |    foo|)

Is there some easy way to do this that I've overlooked?

thanks,

-michael