Large regular expressions

[MRAB]

Nathan Harmston wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> So I m trying to use a very large regular expression, basically I have
> a list of items I want to find in text, its kind of a conjunction of
> two regular expressions and a big list......not pretty. However
> everytime I try to run my code I get this exception:
> 
> OverflowError: regular expression code size limit exceeded
> 
> I understand that there is a Python imposed limit on the size of the
> regular expression. And although its not nice I have a machine with
> 12Gb of RAM just waiting to be used, is there anyway I can alter
> Python to allow big regular expressions?
> 
> Could anyone suggest other methods of these kind of string matching in
> Python? I m trying to see if my swigged alphabet trie is faster than
> whats possible in Python!
> 
There's the regex module at http://pypi.python.org/pypi/regex. It'll
even release the GIL while matching on strings! :-)