Program inefficiency?

[hall.jeff at gmail.com]

I did try moveing the re.compile's up and out of the replacecylce()
but it didn't impact the time in any meaningful way (2 seconds
maybe)...

I'm not sure what an shell+sed script is... I'm fairly new to Python
and my only other coding experience is with VBA... This was my first
Python program

In case it helps... We started with only 6 loops of replacecycle() but
had to keep adding progressively more as we found more and more links
with lots of spaces in them... As we did that, the program's time grew
progressively longer but the length grew multiplicatively with the
added number of cycles... This is exactly what I would have expected
and it leads me to believe that the problem does not lie in the
replacecycle() def but in the masseditor() def... *shrug*