Is there any way to request a feature like this from the RE module keepers, whomever they may be?
The most direct way would be to go to Python at sourceforge[1] and make a feature request to add peek to itertools. (This is probably the most reasonable location for it.) Requests accompanied by patches are much more likely to be accepted. =) Of course, your feature, if accepted, wouldn't be applied until Python 2.5, which is probably about a year and a half off.
I actually thought about doing this myself, but I've got a few other things on my stack, and since itertools is (I believe) written in C, writing the patch would be a little more work...
In the meantime, may I use your code, with accredation to you?
Help yourself. That's what the Cookbook's for. =)
[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/python/ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
