Re: Regexp Confuzzelemt

[akho]

Regular expressions are greedy by default. That means (.*[^\?]) first matches the whole input for .*, backtracks one character and matches "c" for [^\?].

You want #(.*?)\? (the '?' makes the .* non-greedy).

#([^?]*) also works, of course. But it also matches "TTT" in "aaaaaaaa#TTT" (note that there is no question mark).

[ikegami]

But it also matches "TTT" in "aaaaaaaa#TTT"

That's a difference you introduced. If you put the \? back in, it won't.
/#(.*?)\?/
is equivalent to
/#([^?]*)\?/

The latter is safer. It's easy to introduced problems when using non-greedy quantifiers. They're not as resilient. For example, you can safely embed the greedy regexp in a larger regexp, but you can't safely embed the non-greedy regexp in a larger regexp.