title: Wildcard matching a string in Python regex search
body: <p>I thought I would write some quick code to download the number of "fans" a Facebook page has.</p>
  
  <p>For some reason, despite a fair number of iterations I've tried, I can't get the following code to pick out the number of fans in the HTML.  None of the other solutions I found on the web correctly match the regex in this case either. Surely it is possible to have some wildcard between the two matching bits?</p>
  
  <p>The text I'd like to match against is "<strong>6 of X fans</strong>", where X is an arbitrary number of fans a page has - I would like to get this number.</p>
  
  <p>I was thinking of polling this data intermittently and writing to a file but I haven't gotten around to that yet.  I'm also wondering if this is headed in the right direction, as the code seems pretty clunky. :)</p>
  
  <pre><code>import urllib
  import re
  
  fbhandle = urllib.urlopen('http://www.facebook.com/Microsoft')
  pattern = "6 of(.*)fans" #this wild card doesnt appear to work?
  compiled = re.compile(pattern)
  
  for lines in fbhandle.readlines():
          ms = compiled.match(lines)
          print ms #debugging
          if ms: break
  #ms.group()
  print ms
  fbhandle.close()
  </code></pre>