My apologies, given that Google Groups messes up the formatting, the regexp should read
regexp = re.compile("""<li class=\"post\".*?<h4 class=\"desc\"><a href= \"(.*?)\" rel=\"nofollow\">(.*?)</a>.*?</div>\s*(?:<p class=\"notes \">(.*?)</p>)?.*?<div class=\"meta\">(?:to ((?:<a class=\"tag\".*?> ) +))*.*?<span class=\"date\" title=\"(.*?)\">.*?</span>\s*</div>.*?</ li>""", re.DOTALL) -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list