I recently learned about named groups in Python regular expressions. 
Almost all the documentation I've found online explains what they are
and give a simple example of how to use them.  I was trying to use the
variables outside of the original regex, later in the code.  Nowhere in
the documentation I found after a couple hours of searching was it
mentioned that named groups can only be backreferenced _within_ the pattern.

In particular, the sections at
http://www.amk.ca/python/howto/regex/#SECTION000530000000000000000 and
the description of the (?P<name>) behavior at
http://docs.python.org/library/re.html could be modified to make it
clear that the named capture does not create a variable usable outside
of the pattern.

I would be happy to alter the documentation appropriately.