Oh wise ones, Please help before I pull my hair out.
I'm trying to match a pattern not preceed at any time in the string by a ? mark.
Example:
http://www.google.com/?stuff=<<merge>>

[download]
should not match, whereas 
http://<<merge>>.place.com/?blah=blahblah

[download]
should match.

From my research though, negative lookbehind only matches the next character. I can't seem to get around this without getting the error: "Look-behind group does not have an obvious maximum length". 

(?<![^\?]*\?)<<\w+>>; # was my idea, but it doesn't work.

[download]

In reply to negative lookbehind question by shadowpuppet

Title:
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