Do Python regular expressions have an equivalent to Ruby's atomic grouping?

Question

Ruby\'s regular expressions have a feature called atomic grouping (?>regexp), described here, is there any equivalent in Python\'s re module?

Answer 1

It would seem not.

http://www.regular-expressions.info/atomic.html

Atomic grouping is supported by most modern regular expression flavors, including the JGsoft flavor, Java, PCRE, .NET, Perl and Ruby.

You can emulate the non-capturing-ness of them by using non-capturing groups, (?:RE), but if I'm reading it right, that still won't give you the optimization benefits.