Pack 2 Anchor's away

Anchor’s away is about where a match sits: at the start of the text, at the end, or at the edge of a word. Without anchors a pattern happily matches inside longer words. With ^, $ and \b you say exactly where it must begin and end.

You start by catching words that begin and end with an a, so aura is caught and banana is spared. Later levels catch cat as a whole word but spare scatter, then hidden files like .bashrc and command‑line flags like --help, where only the first characters decide.

Every level also has hidden checks: words you don’t see. Passing the words on screen solves a level; passing the hidden checks too ranks it.

Anchors turn up in nearly every validator, so this pack pays off everywhere. Next, Character castles moves on to square brackets, and the Anchors & boundaries track covers multiline mode and other edge cases.