regexp search question

[Paul Rubin]

I have a string s, possibly megabytes in size, and two regexps, p and q.

I want to find the first occurence of q that occurs after the first
occurence of p.

Is there a reasonable way to do it?

    g1 = re.search(p, s)
    g2 = re.search(q, s[g1.end():])
    q_offset = g1.end() + g2.start()

is not a reasonable way, since it copies a ton of data around
(slicing an arbitrary sized chunk off s into a new temporary string).

Most regexps libs I know of have a way to start the search at a
specified offset.  Python's string.find and string.index methods
have a similar optional arg.  But I don't see it described in the
re module docs.

Am I missing something?

Thanks.