Accessing regex capture group content

Is there a way to return the content of the capture groups in a regex match? Below is an example, where I would like to capture the two numbers in the net name:

re = pcreCompile(".*<([0-9]+):([0-9]+)>")
a = pcreExecute(re "node<31:16>")

pcreExecute only returns a True/False result, while I would like to access the content of the capture groups. In this case it would be: list("31" "16")

The solution below works, but it looks ugly...

rel = pcreCompile("^.*<([0-9]+):.*$")
left_number=pcreReplace(rel "node<31:16>" "\\1" 1)
rer = pcreCompile("^.*:([0-9]+)>.*$")
right_number=pcreReplace(rer "node<31:16>" "\\1" 1)