repeating a section of a regular expression?

How about using:

[x.group() for x in re.finditer(r'(\s+(\w*\.*\w*);)*', text)]

Did you find the findall method yet? Or consider splitting at ;?

map(lambda x: x.strip(), s.split(";"))

is probably what you really want.

(\s+(\w*\.*\w*);){12}

The {n} is a "repeat n times"

if you want "12 - 13" times,

(\s+(\w*\.*\w*);){12,13}

if you want "12+" times,

(\s+(\w*\.*\w*);){12,}