Others have pointed out problems with your code.

Here is another way to do it:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $item1 = 'this is a test /test123?';
my ($content) = $item1 =~ m{ / (.*) \? }x;
print "$content\n" if defined $content;
[download]

• Using alternate delimiters m{} allows you to avoid escaping the slash /
• Using the x modifier allows you to separate the components of your regular expression with whitespace for clarity.
• It is a good practice to check if your match succeeded. I used defined.

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