I'm not sure where you want to re.iter over? It still requires a string, so you end up with having to join the input array so you have something to iter on.

no (unless you're talking about the interanl one that is stored in the match object)

(That would still require a string to be built)

Your solution has to compile the regex for every element in the array. You could compile it first to eliminate that overhead, but I suspect it would still be slower as it involves multiple calls to match instead of a single call. str.join and re.findall are both very efficient operations.