[Pyparsing] help with catchall style token

[Carl S. <car...@gm...>]

Hi,

I would like to do something like this with pyparsing:

Sample regex:

r'^\d{2}.*\d{2}$'

this matches on two numbers, followed by whatever is in the middle, and end=
s
with two numbers.

I have tried the following with pyparsing but I can't find a workable
solution:

StringStart() + Word(num,exact=3D2) + Regex('.*') + Word(num,exact=3D2) +
StringEnd()

this doesn't work as the Regex eats everything.

another thing I tried was

StringStart() + Word(num,exact=3D2) + Word(alphas+alphas8bit) +
Word(num,exact=3D2) + StringEnd()

this sort of works but doesn't work for utf-8 encoded characters that may b=
e
in the range below alphas.

Is there a solution here?