Help with regular expression in python

[Matt Funk]

Hi,
i am sorry if this doesn't quite match the subject of the list. If someone 
takes offense please point me to where this question should go. Anyway, i have 
a problem using regular expressions. I would like to match the line:

1.002000e+01 2.037000e+01 2.128000e+01 1.908000e+01 1.871000e+01 1.914000e+01 
2.007000e+01 1.664000e+01 2.204000e+01 2.109000e+01 2.209000e+01 2.376000e+01 
2.158000e+01 2.177000e+01 2.152000e+01 2.267000e+01 1.084000e+01 1.671000e+01 
1.888000e+01 1.854000e+01 2.064000e+01 2.000000e+01 2.200000e+01 2.139000e+01 
2.137000e+01 2.178000e+01 2.179000e+01 2.123000e+01 2.201000e+01 2.150000e+01 
2.150000e+01 2.199000e+01 : (instance: 0)	:	some description

The number of floats can vary (in this example there are 32). So what i thought 
i'd do is the following:
instance_linetype_pattern_str = '([-+]?(\d+(\.\d*)?|\.\d+)([eE][-+]?\d+)?)
{32}'
instance_linetype_pattern = re.compile(instance_linetype_pattern_str)
Basically the expression in the first major set of paranthesis matches a 
scientific number format. The '{32}' is supposed to match the previous 32 
times. However, it doesn't. I  can't figure out why this does not work. I'd 
really like to understand it if someone can shed light on it.

thanks
matt