Overcoming regex memory limits?

[Yin]

I am using python to parse a large text file.  I am using the (.*?)
construct in regular expressions to do matching.  Unfortunately, I
exceed the limit for the match size in this regular expression due to
an overflow of the stack.

I've heard that it may be possible to match without using the (.*?)
construct and this may solve the problem.  Any suggestions short of a
rewriting the parsing routine would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.
Yin