title: pandas regex match all items between two sets of white spaces
body: <p>How can I match everything to include special characters between exactly 3 white spaces to the left and exactly 3 white spaces to the right of a colon? Example denoted with W as a white space. </p>
  
  <p>Example match:</p>
  
  <pre><code>\\s\\s\\sdata\\sstuff:\\s\\sfound\\ssome([%$)Data\\sas\\swhiteSpace\\s\\s\\s
     data stuff:  found some([%$)Data as whiteSpace   
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Example nonMatch:</p>
  
  <pre><code>\\s\\sdata\sstuff:\\s\\sfound\\sno\\sdatacause\\sno\\s3\\sspaces\\sbefore\\sor\\safter\\s\\s
    data stuff:  found no datacause no 3 spaces before or after   
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The intent is to expand this to seperate columns from a single column of a pandas dataframe. </p>
  
  <p>Expected output:</p>
  
  <pre><code>data stuff                                data stuff 2
  found some([%$)Data as whiteSpace         if i had more examples for data stuff 2 it would show here
  extra random data to add into a outputdf  if i had more examples for data stuff 2 it would show here
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Original thought was to use something like this but this doesnt quite work. </p>
  
  <pre><code>"(\\s\\s\\s(.*?)\\:\\s\\s(.*?)\\s\\s\\s)"
  </code></pre>