It's possible your shell has some kind of regular expression magic enabled that ...

JadeNB · on April 9, 2016

Interesting! It seems that my `echo` is eating any substrings involving `?`.

    $ bash --version
    GNU bash, version 4.3.42(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0)
    Copyright (C) 2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
    License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>

    This is free software; you are free to change and redistribute it.
    There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

    $ echo a ? = =?
    a =