janzert added the comment:

The documentation on the | operator in the re module pretty explicitly covers 
this. http://docs.python.org/2/library/re.html

"A|B, where A and B can be arbitrary REs, creates a regular expression that 
will match either A or B. An arbitrary number of REs can be separated by the 
'|' in this way. This can be used inside groups (see below) as well. As the 
target string is scanned, REs separated by '|' are tried from left to right. 
When one pattern completely matches, that branch is accepted. This means that 
once A matches, B will not be tested further, even if it would produce a longer 
overall match. In other words, the '|' operator is never greedy."

----------
nosy: +janzert

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue19055>
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