Sounds like you want to use the [`re.VERBOSE`](https://docs.python.org/2/library/re.html#re.VERBOSE) flag here, to do something like:
```python
TABLE_RE = re.compile(r"""
    <tr>\s+
    <td>edX Author Course</td>\s+
    <td>MITx/edx4edx/edx4edx</td>\s+  # can you add a comment here explaining this section?
    <td>[a-fA-F\d]{40}</td>  # git sha1 hash
""", re.VERBOSE)
```