How often does?

The question mark (?) is a special character in regular expressions that modifies the preceding expression to match zero or one times. For example, the regular expression colou?r matches both color and colour, but not colouur or colr. The question mark is also used to make an expression non-greedy, meaning that it will match the shortest possible string instead of the longest. For example, the regular expression <.?> matches the first pair of angle brackets in a string, while <.> matches the entire string enclosed by the outermost pair of angle brackets. References:

Regular expression - Wikipedia, section “Basic concepts”

How to write Regular Expressions? - GeeksforGeeks, section “Special Characters”