Help with a regular expression

[PaulStat]

I'm wanting to scan through an xml file and store the names of tags I've found in a list

The xml tags take the format

<tag:name param1="" param2=""></tag:name>

I'm just wanting to match the first part of the tag i.e. <tag:name

I've tried writing a re pattern which is

tag_re = "([<]+)([^?]+)((?:[\s])$)"

But it doesn't return any matches, what have I done wrong?

 

[PaulStat]

But I don't know what x and y is, as I said I don't want the entire <tag:name param1="" param2=""> just <tag:name