title: Clean Python Regular Expressions
body: <p>Is there a cleaner way to write long regex patterns in python? I saw this approach somewhere but regex in python doesn't allow lists.</p>
  
  <pre><code>patterns = [
      re.compile(r'&lt;!--([^-&gt;]|(-+[^-&gt;])|(-?&gt;))*-{2,}&gt;'),
      re.compile(r'\n+|\s{2}')
  ]
  </code></pre>