Hi!
Even though Anki Desktop search dialog (in browser) is quite versatile already, having powerful regexp onboard as well as basic logical operators support if you don’t want to use regexps… anyway I dared to make this feature suggestion:
Adding ability (as an option) for Anki’s browser search mechanism to render user defined separators (i.e. spaces, tabs, newlines etc symbols) as ‘OR’ operators. (now e.g. spaces are treated as 'AND’s, other separators are not understood).
That would be extremely useful for a scenario below:
Presume you have a good comprehensive ready-made dictionary language deck with all the bells and whistles you adjusted beforehand where all the cards are suspended.
now, you start reading some material in your target language.
Soon you will have a list of words to learn (a whole lot of applications provide this) and most often its just a column of words (i.e. separated by new line marks),
Imagine you can copy this column and paste to the Anki’s search dialog string directly and then have all words from this list be filtered and shown in the results.
Then you unsuspend them and start to learn! (thanks Jan-Christoph Klie for this brilliant idea!).
Such search algorithm is implemented in (awesome) addon CC-CEDICT-for-Anki where, when I copy a list of words like
中国
美国
德国
俄国
法国
英国
日本
and paste it to the search string, it shows all of these words filtered inside the addon’s window:
(the set of renderable separators is prescribed in configuration file main.py
return [w.strip() for w in re.split(r’[\n，,#%&$/ ]', s, re.M)]
which can be even further extended with user defined symbols.)
Of course people who are familiar with regexp’s basics won’t need that, I myself just have a saved ‘Find&Replace’ in text editor to preformat list to an Anki-renderable search string, but I guess a wider audience might like the tool to easily get a filtered list of cards matching the list they collected beforehand. And that’s not necessarily the scenario I described.