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I am trying to use a verbose regular expression in Python (2.7). If it matters I am just trying to make it easier to go back and more clearly understand the expression sometime in the future. Because I am new I first created a compact expression to make sure I was getting what I wanted. Here is the compact expression: test_verbose_item_pattern = re.compile('\n{1}\b?I[tT][eE][mM]\s+\d{1,2}\.?\(?[a-e]?\)?.*[^0-9]\n{1}') It works as expected Here is the Verbose expression verbose_item_pattern = re.compile(""" \n{1} #begin with a new line allow only one new line character \b? #allow for a word boundary the ? allows 0 or 1 word boundaries \nITEM or \n ITEM I # the first word on the line must begin with a capital I [tT][eE][mM] #then we need one character from each of the three sets this allows for unknown case \s+ # one or more white spaces this does allow for another \n not sure if I should change it \d{1,2} # require one or two digits \.? # there could be 0 or 1 periods after the digits 1. or 1 \(? # there might be 0 or 1 instance of an open paren [a-e]? # there could be 0 or 1 instance of a letter in the range a-e \)? # there could be 0 or 1 instance of a closing paren .* #any number of unknown characters so we can have words and punctuation [^0-9] # by its placement I am hoping that I am stating that I do not want to allow strings that end with a number and then \n \n{1} #I want to cut it off at the next newline character """,re.VERBOSE) The problem is that when I run the verbose pattern I get an exception Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:/Users/Dropbox/directEDGAR-Code-Examples/NewItemIdentifier.py", line 17, in <module> """,re.VERBOSE) File "C:\Python27\lib\re.py", line 190, in compile return _compile(pattern, flags) File "C:\Python27\lib\re.py", line 242, in _compile

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