OverflowError: regular expression code size limit exceeded

[gdetre at princeton.edu]

Dear all,

I'm trying to get a large, machine-generated regular expression (many
thousands of characters) to work in Python on a Mac (running Leopard),
and I keep banging my head against this brick wall:

>>> update_implicit_link_regexp_temp()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/Users/greg/elisp/freex/freex_sqlalchemy.py", line 715, in
update_implicit_link_regexp_temp
    impLinkRegexp = re.compile(aliasRegexpStr,re.IGNORECASE|
re.MULTILINE)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/
python2.5/re.py", line 180, in compile
    return _compile(pattern, flags)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/
python2.5/re.py", line 231, in _compile
    p = sre_compile.compile(pattern, flags)
  File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/
python2.5/sre_compile.py", line 530, in compile
    groupindex, indexgroup
OverflowError: regular expression code size limit exceeded

I have successfully run this regular expression many times under
linux. I tried it first with the default python iinstallation on
Leopard, 2.5.1, but I've also tried it with tthe latest .dmg i could
find on the python.org site:

Python 2.5.2 (r252:60911, Feb 22 2008, 07:57:53)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 5363)] on darwin

I'm really lost about how to proceed. Any ideas?

Thank you,
   Greg