Escaping double colon "::" in cloze deletion cards

Card Design
1

Hello there :slight_smile:

i was wondering, if there is a recommended way of escaping a double colon (“::”) when used in a cloze deletion card as the actual text to be clozed.

My use case for this is a couple of cards i want to make for the Backus-Naur Form, which uses “::=” as a part of the syntax.

My preliminary solution has been to use the html <span> element between the two colons, which then looks something like this:

{{c1::<span>:</span>:=}}

This does seem to work, but it feels a bit like a hacky solution.

Is there a better way of doing this?

Cheers!

2

There’s no escape character, but you could try a zero width space as a more compact workaround.

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Thanks for the suggestion!

Putting a zero width space between the colons does indeed seem to work for the standard cloze deletion cards.

I should have mentioned that i also want to make a second cloze deletion card type, where i’m prompted to type in the correct answer.

When comparing the given answer with the enclozed text, Anki recognizes the zero width space as a character and marks the given answer as wrong, if you don’t type a space between the colons.

You could obviously just ignore this “false negative”, but its not ideal. So in this respect it seems like the <span> element is the better solution.

1 Like
4

Hello @dae, I hope you’re well :slight_smile:

I was wondering, is there a reason Anki can’t or shouldn’t implement an official escape mechanism to enable “::” as content within cloze deletions? I’ve contributed to this “multiple cloze” add-on and recently implemented basic support for using a zero-width space between colons without the false-negative issue Hildeguard mentioned. Using <span> tags creatively doesn’t work when converting HTML to text for expected <-> given comparisons. It’s also impossible to handle consistently if everyone uses a slightly different workaround.

Others have been asking about this capability for years (here and here). Perhaps it’s a rare need, perhaps a sizeable number of users simply work around the issue without asking.

I would be happy to contribute to Anki, maybe something like what I suggested here, if you agree it would be worth the effort. What do you think? Would it require much more effort than one might imagine?

Thanks for your consideration!

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Our parsing code currently assumes the extracted text will be an unmodified slice of the original. To support this, you’d presumably need to switch to a Cow, and then use an allocated string if the separator needs to be unescaped, eg \:: → ::.