[esmre](https://code.google.com/p/esmre/) is a great library to scan text for a large collection of pattern. Too bad that the package seem unmaintained anymore.

The latest offical built is for python 2.6. I use this library in my project and need to upgrade to python 2.7. So, in case you don’t want bother to setup the build environment, you could use mine.

I built it for win32.