Web Filter exclusions "wildcards"

Hello.
What is the correct format for using wildcards in exclusions (Webfilter)?
Seems there are a lot of ways to do that, but which one should be used?
I want to exclude the site "www.ava-cooling.at" with subdomain "shop.ava-cooling.at". Some parts of the site have pages like for example "www.ava-cooling.at/page2/test.html". Some parts of the site use SSL others don´t.
*
What is the difference in the following ones:
https?://[A-Za-z0-9.-]*\.ava-cooling\.at and
^https?://[A-Za-z0-9.-]*\.ava-cooling\.at
Is there a difference in behavior for this? Only the "^" at the beginning is changed.
*
I also read, that it could be like this:
https?://([A-Za-z0-9.-]*\.)?ava-cooling\.at/ and
^https?://([A-Za-z0-9.-]*\.)?ava-cooling\.at/

Does "https?://" also work if its only http:// or do i need to setup two exclusions like "https://" and "http://" or does it work with "http?://" for both?
With wildcard usage in other applications the "?" stands for one random character. What does "^" stand for?

V 8.301 is used.
Whould be a great help if someone could clear this up for me. I just don´t want to use "*" for exclusions.

Thanks for your input.

Michael