The sre module

(Implementation). This module is a low-level implementation module for the 2.0 re module. There’s usually no need to use this module directly (and code using it may stop working in future releases).

# File: sre-example-1.py

import sre

text = "The Bookshop Sketch"

# a single character
m = sre.match(".", text)
if m: print repr("."), "=>", repr(m.group(0))

# and so on, for all 're' examples...

'.' => 'T'