This is something that the regex module already has, and since it is/was supposed to replace the re module in stdlib, I've been holding off to add to re for a long time.  We also discussed this recently on #python-dev, and I think it's OK to add it, as long as it behaves the same way as it does in the regex module.
If others agree it would be great to do it before the 3.4 feature freeze (there aren't many days left).