Hunter basics

A regular expression, or regex, is a short pattern that describes text. You hand it a string and it answers one question: is there a match somewhere in here? In Regex Hunter that answer decides your hunt. The pattern has to catch every target word and spare every innocent one. Regex is built into JavaScript, Python, search tools and most code editors, so what you learn here works well beyond the game.

Most patterns start with literal characters. A letter or digit in a regex stands for itself, so ink looks for an i, then an n, then a k, in that order. It doesn't care where they sit. Without extra markers a regex matches anywhere inside the string, which is why ink also finds pinky and inkwell.

The second building block is the dot. A . fills one slot with any single character: a letter, a digit, a space or a symbol. t.p fits tip, top and t-p, but never tp, because the dot always takes exactly one character. Chain a few dots to describe a fixed-length gap. These two ideas, literal text and the wildcard, are the base for every pattern you will write later.