import re text = "He was carefully 123 disguised but captured quickly by police." #p = re.compile(' [a-z]+ ') #result = p.match(text) #print (result.group()) bible = open('bible.txt') bibleText = bible.read() bible.close() for m in re.finditer(r"Book \d\d.*\r\n\r\n\d\d\d:\d\d\d Jude,", bibleText): print ( m.group(0))