Fast Anki Cloze Deletion Cards

[rdearman]

I just wanted to share a script I made for generating tons of cloze deletion cards with a perl script. You need a text file with each sentence on a new line then just run the script below on the file. You just feed it the sentence file as the first argument and the output csv file you want to create as the second argument. If you want to know how to split a document on punctuation I covered that previously using libreoffice.

Code: Select all

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $filename   = $ARGV[0];
my $outfile = $ARGV[1];

# my $filename = "psicologia_italian2.txt";
# my $outfile = "cloze_it.csv";
open(my $fh,  '<:encoding(UTF-8)', $filename) ;
open(my $ofh, '>:encoding(UTF-8)', $outfile);

while (my $row = <$fh>)
{
    my $wordcount;
    chomp $row;
    my @words =  $row =~ /\w+/g ;
    $wordcount = scalar( @words );
    for (my $a=0;$a<$wordcount;$a++)
    {
        print $ofh "{{c" . $a . "::" . $words[$a] . "}} " ;
    }
    print $ofh "\n";
}
print "done\n";


This will cloze delete every word in the file. When you import the file into anki make sure you specify a tab delimited file, or it will not work.

[cjareck]

This script, unfortunately, will not help me solve the most complicated activity by creating cloze cards - choosing of appropriate pictures to prompt meaning of the hidden word

[rdearman]

This will cloze delete every word in the file.

Can you show us an example?

Do you mean that if we put one sentence (for example, "This will cloze delete every word in the file."), it will generate these 9 sentences?

____ will cloze delete every word in the file.
This ____ cloze delete every word in the file.
This will ____ delete every word in the file.
This will cloze ____ every word in the file.
This will cloze delete ____ word in the file.
This will cloze delete every ____ in the file.
This will cloze delete every word ____ the file.
This will cloze delete every word in ____ file.
This will cloze delete every word in the ____ .

Exactly that.

[Adrianslont]

I just wanted to share a script I made for generating tons of cloze deletion cards with a perl script. You need a text file with each sentence on a new line then just run the script below on the file. You just feed it the sentence file as the first argument and the output csv file you want to create as the second argument. If you want to know how to split a document on punctuation I covered that previously using libreoffice.

Code: Select all

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $filename   = $ARGV[0];
my $outfile = $ARGV[1];

# my $filename = "psicologia_italian2.txt";
# my $outfile = "cloze_it.csv";
open(my $fh,  '<:encoding(UTF-8)', $filename) ;
open(my $ofh, '>:encoding(UTF-8)', $outfile);

while (my $row = <$fh>)
{
    my $wordcount;
    chomp $row;
    my @words =  $row =~ /\w+/g ;
    $wordcount = scalar( @words );
    for (my $a=0;$a<$wordcount;$a++)
    {
        print $ofh "{{c" . $a . "::" . $words[$a] . "}} " ;
    }
    print $ofh "\n";
}
print "done\n";


This will cloze delete every word in the file. When you import the file into anki make sure you specify a tab delimited file, or it will not work.

Rdearman , I am very interested in this but I am an A0 at running scripts. “Just run the script below” means close to zero to me. This has happened a few times on the forum but this script interests me enough to shyly ask how to do that.

I’m not bad with using software (not clueless) but programming and scripts are a black hole for me.

Would you be so kind as to give me a quick guide? I guess it involves the command line thingy invoked from the windows button. I imagine I need to have my text file in the right place. Do I need to install anything - something Called Perl maybe?

I did have a quick look around YouTube for guidance but got lost quickly.

If you could give me a hand without too much trouble or point me in a direction where I could self teach I would be grateful.

[rdearman]

Windoze... sigh. OK. It is still fairly simple, so I'll try to outline it quickly.

• Save the script into a file, you can name it whatever you want, I named it cloze.pl for my example.
• Put the script and the file you want to transform together in a folder.
• Install Perl on windows by going to strawberryperl.com and downloading Strawberry Perl. Either 64 or 32 bit depending on your computer.
• After it is installed you'll find an option in your start menu called "Perl (Command line)" which you click and a cmd box appears.
• Navigate to the folder with the two files and run the command:
  

  Code: Select all

  perl cloze.pl input.txt output.csv
• Then import the output.csv file into anki. Change "Fields separated by colon" to "Fields separated by tabs" and it should suck in all the cards.

If you have any problems just post them here, because if you have the problem someone else might too. I didn't have perl on my windows machine, so I wrote out the steps above as I did it myself, so they should work for you.

[Adrianslont]

Windoze... sigh. OK. It is still fairly simple, so I'll try to outline it quickly.

• Save the script into a file, you can name it whatever you want, I named it cloze.pl for my example.
• Put the script and the file you want to transform together in a folder.
• Install Perl on windows by going to strawberryperl.com and downloading Strawberry Perl. Either 64 or 32 bit depending on your computer.
• After it is installed you'll find an option in your start menu called "Perl (Command line)" which you click and a cmd box appears.
• Navigate to the folder with the two files and run the command:
  

  Code: Select all

  perl cloze.pl input.txt output.csv
• Then import the output.csv file into anki. Change "Fields separated by colon" to "Fields separated by tabs" and it should suck in all the cards.

If you have any problems just post them here, because if you have the problem someone else might too. I didn't have perl on my windows machine, so I wrote out the steps above as I did it myself, so they should work for you.

Thanks for that Rick.

After stumbling around I managed to get there. I have turned a novel into 84000+ cloze cards. Some aggressive deletion is in order. Your script made the .csv file in a trillionth of a nano second once I figured out what to do.

I feel like a big kid now.

I will find a more suitable text - I just had that one to hand, already divided into 1 sentence per line for some other reason - so I thought I'd give it a go.

There is a problem with some of the cards, though - all the apostrophes are missing! Any ideas about how to rectify that?

Cheers

[rdearman]

hummm... I didn't account for punctuation marks. I suspect commas and other "non word" characters have also been stripped. There is a saying in programming.

A programmer has a problem with his code, so he decides to add a regular expression to his code. Now the programmer has two problems with his code.

[Adrianslont]

hummm... I didn't account for punctuation marks. I suspect commas and other "non word" characters have also been stripped. There is a saying in programming.

A programmer has a problem with his code, so he decides to add a regular expression to his code. Now the programmer has two problems with his code.

That’s almost all Greek to me - I don’t know what a “regular expression” is (no need to explain it) but I can sort of guess from the context.

I have worked with programmers and remember striking this problem before - 10 years ago. It all came good in the end, sort of.

[rdearman]

OK, I've modified it to deal with words which contain ' or - so it can now successfully deal with: l'orange and part-time.

Code: Select all

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $filename   = $ARGV[0];
my $outfile = $ARGV[1];


open(my $fh,  '<:encoding(UTF-8)', $filename) ;
open(my $ofh, '>:encoding(UTF-8)', $outfile);

while (my $row = <$fh>)
{
    my $wordcount;
    chomp $row;
    my @words =  $row =~ /\w+[\'\-]\w+|\w+/g ;
    $wordcount = scalar( @words );
    for (my $a=0;$a<$wordcount;$a++)
    {
   print $ofh "{{c" . $a . "::" . $words[$a] . "}} " ;
    }
    print $ofh "\n";
}
print "done\n";



[Brun Ugle]

Rick, you were looking for ideas for your video series. May I suggest a how-to-video on this? Step by step, for dummies version.