[Tutor] re module fails to handle text > 16142 characters ???

[pan@uchicago.edu]

The other day I was using re to do some parsing and 
found that one of the text that I tried to parse returned
an error :

   return reObj.findall(doc)[0]
   RuntimeError: maximum recursion limit exceeded

After some painful debugging, I found:

let S = len(doc)

1. When S > 16143: re.find function failed;
2. When S = 16143: failed too
3. When S = 16142: successful. This was tested by deleting ANY
   character in that 16143-long doc.

I am using Python 2.2.1. Is this a known-bug???

I would really like to post the entire code here but it's very 
long, so I think it's better to ask first to see if it's a known
bug.

pan