gistfile1.txt

In [1]: import re

In [2]: p = re.compile('foo.*bar')

In [3]: s = 'foo' + 'a' * 2**16 + 'bar'

In [4]: len(s)
Out[4]: 65542

In [5]: p.
p.findall     p.finditer    p.flags       p.groupindex  p.groups      p.match       p.pattern     p.scanner     p.search      p.split       p.sub         p.subn        

In [5]: p.match(s)
Out[5]: <_sre.SRE_Match at 0x104c83648>