Just rely on greedy and non-greedy matching to eat up all the spaces where appropriate. Don't need any special new features, or even any additional boundary conditions: 
my ($prefix, $content) = $line =~ /
   ^
   \s*
   ([*#]+:?)
   \s*
   (.*?)
   \s*
   $
/x

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In reply to Re: Regex: not the trailing whitespace by wind
in thread Regex: not the trailing whitespace by John M. Dlugosz

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