Jared.S., even if a regex doesn't look like a program, it's like a small program written in a strange language. And you have to test and comment your programs. So I suggest you to program in a more tidy way, and add unit tests (doctests may suffice here) to your regexes, you can also use the verbose mode and comment them, and you can even indent their sub-parts as pieces of a program. You must test all your bricks (in python, not in TextMate) before using them to build something bigger.
Bye, bearophile -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list