Manipulating Binary Data

[ichabod801]

You don't need to mess with regular expressions. Just chop them up and feed them in to a defaultdict, and you're good to go.

import collections
data = collections.defaultdict(list)
for file_data in ('AA08430022', 'AA08410234', 'AB81130138'):
    timestamp = file_data[:4]
    datum = file_data[4:]
    data[timestamp].append(datum)

Output:
>>> data
{'AA08': ['430022', '410234'], 'AB81': ['130138']}