line = '2012-11-06 22:26:56 200 - 12 - - - 283 356781 356781 2.131220 3.458226 67.86.65.47 "GET /dc/4e5bf73e94a6f629c900461b/5050023594739936eb00054a/mp4_h264_aac-1347413541.flv" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/22.0.1229.94 Safari/537.4" "" 188.65.122.1 2' RE=r'^(?P.*?)\s(?P.*?)\s(?P.*?)\s(?P.*?)\s(?P.*?)\s(?P.*?)\s(?P.*?)\s(?P.*?)\s(?P.*?)\s(?P.*?)\s(?P.*?)\s(?P.*?)\s(?P.*?)\s.*"(?P.*?)"\s"(?P.*?)"\s"(?P.*?)"$' from re import match ids = match(RE, line) print ids.groups()