title: repeating a section of a regular expression?
body: <p>I'm having to parse a text dump of a spreadsheet.  I have a regular expression that correctly parses each line of the data, but it's rather long.  It's basically just matching a certain pattern 12 or 13 times.</p>
  
  <p>The pattern I want to repeat is </p>
  
  <pre><code>\s+(\w*\.*\w*);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This is the regular expression (shortened)</p>
  
  <pre><code>^\s+(\w*\.*\w*);\s+(\w*\.*\w*);\s+(\w*\.*\w*);\s+(\w*\.*\w*);\s+(\w*\.*\w*);\s+(\w*\.*\w*);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Is there a way to match a pattern a set number of times without copy pasting like this?  Each of those sections correspond to data columns, all of which I need.  I'm using Python by the way.  Thanks!</p>