Matthew Barnett added the comment:
Ideally, yes, that whitespace should be ignored.
The question is whether it's worth fixing the code for the small case of when
there's whitespace within "tokens", such as within "(?:". Usually those who use
verbose mode use whitespace as in the first example
New submission from Steven Collins:
Given the way the documentation is written for re.VERBOSE - "Whitespace within
the pattern is ignored, except when in a character class or preceded by an
unescaped backslash" - I would expect all three of the findall() commands below
to return successfully w
