very nice solution

Tried using this syntax for something else using elifs, didn't realise multiple elses could be chained like this until now.

Regex ftw

alr raised as issue

Agreed. These tests are very brittle.

This doesn't always work in Python 3

There are very few test cases, should add more or random tests

Still not fixed

You should have more tests, the shortcut test can easily be bypassed

Well, there's the problem, can't come up with one :P
I'll try some more then

Thinking of a good algorithm does not depend on the language you implement it in. If you can come up with a good algorithm, you can implement it in any language you like ;-)

That's the issue, I've got no clue how to get it that effecient. I'm probably a bit in over my head with this problem since I'm fairly new to python programming, but I can't seem to find a better way than my sluggish solution