> I can easily understand how + can be built but am having trouble with
> building ? (zero or one).

If there is a regular expression e for the empty word, one can define ? as

   a? = e | a

If there is a regular expression o that never matches one can define e as

   e = o*

If there are character classes one can define o as

   o = []

Apart from that, I have no idea..

Sebastian