Question

This should be easy and this regex works fine to search for words beginning with specific characters, but I can’t get it to match hashes and question marks.

This works and matches words beginning a:

r = re.compile(r"\b([a])(\w+)\b")

But these don’t match:
Tried:

r = re.compile(r"\b([#?])(\w+)\b")
r = re.compile(r"\b([\#\?])(\w+)\b")
r = re.compile( r"([#\?][\w]+)?")

even tried just matching hashes

r = re.compile( r"([#][\w]+)?"
r = re.compile( r"([/#][\w]+)?"

text = "this is one #tag and this is ?another tag"
items = r.findall(text)

expecting to get:

[('#', 'tag'), ('?', 'another')]

Answer 1

\b matches the empty space between a \w and \W (or between a \W and \w) but there is no \b before a # or ?.

In other words: remove the first word boundary.

Not:

r = re.compile(r"\b([#?])(\w+)\b")

but

r = re.compile(r"([#?])(\w+)\b")