Parsing HTML with regex

RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags

I need to match all of these opening tags:

<p>
<a href="foo">

But not these:

<br />
<hr class="foo" />

I came up with this and wanted to make sure I've got it right. I am only capturing the a-z.
<([a-z]+) *[^/]*?>

I believe it says:
 * Find a less-than, then
 * Find (and capture) a-z one or more times, then
 * Find zero or more spaces, then
 * Find any character zero or more times, greedy, except /, then
 * Find a greater-than

Do I have that right? And more importantly, what do you think?

http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/