Regular expression fun. Repeated matching of a group Q

[matteosartori at gmail.com]

Hi all,

I've spent all morning trying to work this one out:

I've got the following string:

<td>04/01/2006</td><td>Wednesday</td><td> </td><td>09:14</td><td>12:44</td><td>12:50</td><td>17:58</td><td> </td><td> </td><td> </td><td> </td><td>08:14</td>

from which I'm attempting to extract the date, and the five times from
into a list. Only the very last time is guaranteed to be there so it
should also work for a line like:

<td>03/01/2006</td><td>Tuesday</td><td>Annual_Holiday</td><td> </td><td> </td><td> </td><td> </td><td> </td><td> </td><td> </td><td> </td><td>08:00</td>

My Python regular expression to match that is currently:

digs = re.compile(
r'<td>(\d{2}\/\d{2}\/\d{4})</td>.*?(?:<td>(\d+\:\d+)</td>).*$' )

which first extracts the date into group 1
then matches the tags between the date and the first instance of a time
into group 2
then matches the first instance of a time into group 3
but then group 4 grabs all the remaining string.

I've tried changing the time pattern into

(?:<td>(\d+\:\d+)</td>)+

 but that doesn't seem to mean "grab one or more cases of the previous
regexp."

Any Python regexp gurus with a hint would be greatly appreciated.

M@