[Tutor] regular expression question

[nihilo]

hi,

I'm stuck on a regular expression. I want to match everything starting from a word up to and including the next occurence of the word.

If the word were a single character (say 'a'), then I could do the following:

pat = re.compile('a[^a]*a')

The problem is that I haven't been able to find out how to exclude the word if it is more than one character. [^word] excludes the individual letters, not the word as a whole, and I tried grouping with braces and parentheses  [^(word)], but these don't work.  I've checked many re tutorials, and they all say how to exclude a single character from the set of characters inside the brackets, but not how to exclude more than 1 character.

thanks for any help or pointers to resources...