What does ?: do in regex

Question

I have a regex that looks like this

/^(?:\\w+\\s)*(\\w+)$*/

What is the ?:?

Answer 1

It indicates that the subpattern is a non-capture subpattern. That means whatever is matched in (?:\w+\s), even though it's enclosed by () it won't appear in the list of matches, only (\w+) will.

You're still looking for a specific pattern (in this case, a single whitespace character following at least one word), but you don't care what's actually matched.