I did wonder if that was the case but I couldn't find anything about it. Just discovered re._MAXCACHE which implies it does cache. Tested and in my case the per

I did wonder if that was the case but I couldn't find anything about it. Just discovered re._MAXCACHE which implies it does cache. Tested and in my case the performance is the same. Thanks for the tip (I was posting half hoping someone would have a better solution). That's another 3 lines of code removed :)