re.sub() loops

[Andreas Jung]

I am trying to do some lame HTML processing with some
HTML. The following lines tries to remove some
unneccessary code from a HTML file. However python hangs
in this call:

data = re.sub('<TABLE.*?es.*?da.*?en.*?fi.*?sv.*?TABLE>','',data)    

Any idea why ? My env: Python 1.5.2 under Solaris 2.5.1 - 7.0.

Andreas