I have two problems, one of them is a regex
.net-3.5, c#, regex
Solution
The syntax `(?:)` is a way of putting parentheses around a subexpression without separately extracting that part of the string.
The author wanted to match the `(.*?)` part in the middle, and didn't want the spaces at the beginning or the end from getting in the way. Now you can use `\1` or `$1` (or whatever the appropriate method is in your particular language) to refer to the domain name, instead of the first chunk of spaces at the beginning of the string
Problem
I am updating some code that I didn't write and part of it is a regex as follows: ``` \[url(?:\s*)\]www\.(.*?)\[/url(?:\s*)\] ``` I understand that .*? does a non-greedy match of everything in the second register. What does ?:\s* in the first and third registers do? Update: As requested, language is C# on .NET 3.5