With pre-compiled regex the Python version comes down to 1.483s on my machine which is still considerably slower than Perl. I wrote versions of these using substring `index` instead of a regex and Perl was still the clear winner:

    time ./index.pl  0.258s
    time ./index.py  0.609s

If you factor-in that Python startup time is 0.279s slower than Perl the processing differential comes down to 0.072s.