This is very old code, without a mature API.  Will take a look at
competing recipes to see if this is still the best way of doing this. 
Maybe it should return a generator instead of a list.  Perhaps there
should be some checking for re's that don't combine well.  Also, would
like to see it exercised on a number of common parsing tasks to see how
well it holds up.  Better to do this work than to expose what is there
now and get hit with bug reports, feature requests, deprecations, and
cases where is it almost the right tool for the job.