re.findall and re.finditer has very different signature. One iterates over match objects, the other returns a list of tuples.

I can think of two ways to make them more similar:

1) Make match objects iterable over their captures. With this, you could write something like the following:

for key,value in re.finditer(r'(\w+):(\w+)', text):
  data[key] = value

2) Make re.findall return an iterator over tuples. This would decrease the memory footprint.