Hi!

I think I discovered a limitation of the "new" Regular
Expression engine.  I
have put together an example which shows the behavior at
 
http://stud4.tuwien.ac.at/~e9326522/temporary/re_bug_example.zip
(69kB)

When the script is run with Python 1.5.2 by invoking
  psmergeNS.py *.ps

everything is fine and it produces a merged output file
containing both
PostScript files.

When using Python 2.x the following Exception is raised:

  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "psmergeNS4.py", line 35, in ?
      pages = theRE.findall(contents)
  RuntimeError: maximum recursion limit exceeded

This behavior is the same with the Linux and the Win32
version of Python.

Markus

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I had the same problem, but only when using *? matching
several kB text.
It seems the the *? backtracking function is recursive and
cannot handle several thousand characters...

Greetings

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Saving /F the trouble of closing this, since it's a duplicate of 
<http://python.org/sf/493252> and several others.  Read the followups 
there for ways to avoid/workaround the problem.  If you absolutely can't 
modify your regular expression to be less abusive of the stack, you can 
always 

    import pre as re

and deal with the long match times you'll encounter instead.