In my perpetual attempt to make my language learning process using Anki more efficient, I’ve written a tool to extract English-language definitions from Russian words from Wiktionary. I wrote about the idea previously in Scraping Russian word definitions from Wikitionary: utility for Anki but it relied on the WiktionaryParser module which is good but misses some important edge cases. So I rolled up my sleeves and crafted my own solution. As with WiktionaryParser the heavy-lifting is done by the Beautiful Soup parser.
A few years ago, I wrote about my problems with HTML in Anki fields. If you check out that previous post you’ll get the backstory about my objection.
The gist is this: If you copy something from the web, Anki tries to maintain the formatting. Basically it just pastes the HTML off the clipboard. Supposedly, Anki offers to strip the formatting with Shift-paste, but I’ve point out to the developer specific examples where this fails.
Interesting links, a little thoughts for Monday, May 23, 2022.
More outages at Pinboard. It was time to find an open-source self-hosted alternative.
Espial, it turns out, works great.
I have written previously about stripping syllabic stress marks from Russian text using a Perl-based regex tool. But I needed a means of doing in solely in Python, so this just extends that idea.
#!/usr/bin/env python3 def strip_stress_marks(text: str) -> str: b = text.encode('utf-8') # correct error where latin accented ó is used b = b.replace(b'\xc3\xb3', b'\xd0\xbe') # correct error where latin accented á is used b = b.replace(b'\xc3\xa1', b'\xd0\xb0') # correct error where latin accented é is used b = b.
One of the things that I love about Keyboard Maestro is the ability to chain together disparate technologies to achieve some automation goal on macOS.
In most of my previous posts about Keyboard Maestro macros, I’ve used Python or shell scripts, but I decided to draw on some decades-old experience with Perl to do a little text processing for a specific need.
Background I want this text from Wiktionary:
to look like this:
It seems like the command line is one of those places where you can accomplish crazy efficient things with one-liners.
Here’s a perfect use case for a CLI one-liner:
In Anki, I often add lists of synonyms and antonyms to my vocabulary cards, but I like them formatted as a bulleted list. My usual route to that involves Markdown. But how to convert this:
известный, точный, определённый, достоверный
to
известный - точный - определённый - достоверный After trying to come up with a single text replacement strategy to make this work, the best I could do was this:
The ability to execute Javascript in Anki card templates offers users flexibility in displaying data. In Anki 2.1, though, the asynchronous execution of Javascript means that user script functionality is not entirely predictable. This post on r/Anki discusses an approach for dynamically loading Javascript resources and ensuring that they are available when the card is displayed. Since I modularize my Javascript code so that it can be flexibly deployed to different card types, I extended this method to allow the template developer to load multiple scripts in one <script> block.
It’s possible to use cloze deletion cards within standard Anki note types using the Anki Cloze Anything setup. But additional scripts are required to allow it to function seamlessly in a typical language-learning environment. I’ll show you how to flexibly display a sentence with or without Anki Cloze Anything markup and also not break AwesomeTTS.
Anki’s built-in cloze deletion system The built-in cloze deletion feature in Anki is an excellent way for language learners to actively test their recall.
I write in Markdown because it’s much easier to keep the flow of writing going without taking my hands off the keyboard.
I also like to write content in Anki cards in Markdown. Over the years there have been various ways in of supporting this through add-ons:
The venerable Power Format Pack was great but no longer supports Anki 2.1, so it became useless. Auto Markdown worked for a while but as of Anki version 2.