Pack 1 Shorthand patrol

Shorthand patrol is the first practice pack, and it’s built on the three shorthand classes. \d stands for any digit, \w for a letter, digit or underscore, and \s for a space or tab. Their capital twins, \D, \W and \S, mean the opposite. One short token does the job of a whole bracket list.

The first board catches words made only of digits, so 1024 is caught and file9 is spared. Later boards catch words of five letters or more, a double space hiding between two words like wait what, text with no whitespace at all, such as snake_case, and text with no digits in it.

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.

When the shorthands feel natural, Anchor’s away shows how to pin a match to the start or end of the text. The Character classes track explains the same tokens step by step.