As far as I can tell, it isn't posible to exclude multiple lines with exclude_lines. If I am reading the code correctly, it uses the lines_matching function, which checks the regexes line-by-line

https://github.com/nedbat/coveragepy/blob/eb5d81a302693abc08508e6431392056cc5043c9/coverage/parser.py#L99-L115

My use-case is I want to exclude lines like

except ValueError: 
    assume(False)

where assume is from hypothesis. Simply excluding assume(False) doesn't work because it doesn't exclude the except. I don't want to exclude other except ValueError blocks in the codebase. I know I can rewrite this as except ValueError: assume(False) on a single line, but I would prefer not to as I don't like code that does that.

What I would like to do is to write something like

[report]
exclude_lines = 
    except ValueError:\n *assume\(False\)

Or if that can't work

[report]
exclude_lines = 
    except ValueError:(?=\n *assume\(False\))

Neither of these work presently. As far as I can tell this can only be excluded by manually putting # pragma: no cover on each instance.