regex error - nothing to repeat

That is a Python bug between "*" and special characters.

Instead of

re.compile(r"\w*")

Try:

re.compile(r"[a-zA-Z0-9]*")

It works, however does not make the same regular expression.

This bug seems to have been fixed between 2.7.5 and 2.7.6.

It seems to be a python bug (that works perfectly in vim). The source of the problem is the (\s*...)+ bit. Basically , you can't do (\s*)+ which make sense , because you are trying to repeat something which can be null.

>>> re.compile(r"(\s*)+")
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/re.py", line 180, in compile
    return _compile(pattern, flags)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/re.py", line 233, in _compile
    raise error, v # invalid expression
sre_constants.error: nothing to repeat

However (\s*\1) should not be null, but we know it only because we know what's in \1. Apparently python doesn't ... that's weird.