import lxml.etree myrpki = lxml.etree.RelaxNG(lxml.etree.fromstring(''' 512000 255 [\-_A-Za-z0-9]* 255 [\-_A-Za-z0-9/]* 4096 512000 [\-,0-9]* 512000 [\-,0-9/.]* 512000 [\-,0-9/:a-fA-F]* 1 .*Z '''))