Making a capture group inside a non capturing group causes the non-capturing group to capture.

[AdrienDerobert]

Bug report

Bug description:

For some reason declaring a capture group inside a non-capturing group causes the non-capturing group to capture its content. Either the documentation doesn't explain the non-capturing group behavior correctly or this is a bug.

Note: The example here doesn't need the non-capturing group but I use it in a longer > regex. This is the minimal setup for reproducing the behavior I'm encountering.

import re
match = re.match(r'(:?test[(]([^)]*)[)])', "test(abc)")
print(match)

Result:

('test(abc)', 'abc')

Expected result:

('abc')

CPython versions tested on:

3.13, 3.12

Operating systems tested on:

Linux

[StanFromIreland]

User error

>>> import re
... match = re.match(r'(:?test[(]([^)]*)[)])', "test(abc)")
... print(match.groups())
... 
('test(abc)', 'abc')
>>> import re
... match = re.match(r'(?:test[(]([^)]*)[)])', "test(abc)") # <- wrong order of '?' was your bug
... print(match.groups())
... 
('abc',)

[AdrienDerobert]

Effectively that is a dumb mistake on my part 😑