Couple relevant links. "regex"[1] is an upward-compatible "re" replacement with better performance and many added features including fuzzy matching. Second, th

Couple relevant links. "regex"[1] is an upward-compatible "re" replacement with better performance and many added features including fuzzy matching. Second, the tokenizer technique of stacked expressions described in the OP is also documented in the Python re module doc[2], at least conceptually. [1] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/regex/2017.04.29 https://pypi.python.org/pypi/regex/2017.04.29 [2] https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/re.html#writing-a-tokenizer https://docs.python.org/3.5/library/re.html#writing-a-tokeni...