nntplib.NNTP.descriptions()

NNTP.descriptions(grouppattern)

Send a LIST NEWSGROUPS command, where grouppattern is a wildmat string as specified in RFC 3977 (it’s essentially the same as DOS or UNIX shell wildcard strings). Return a pair (response, descriptions), where descriptions is a dictionary mapping group names to textual descriptions.

>>> resp, descs = s.descriptions('gmane.comp.python.*')
>>> len(descs) 
295
>>> descs.popitem() 
('gmane.comp.python.bio.general', 'BioPython discussion list (Moderated)')