Exporting filtered content from a deck to a text file

Rather new to Anki and I’m looking for more advanced export functionality, which I can’t find.

I have a deck where notes have two cards, base and reversed. Each card has front and back, and also a field for verb conjugation. This is a plain language word list, and what I’d like to do is to export only the front and back text from the base card into a text file.

What I thought would work was to create a filtered subdeck with only the base cards, not the reverse ones, and then use the Export command, but as it turns out it only always export the full notes, so both the base and the reversed cards are included.

Is there any way to filter the export function to include only what’s in the subdeck? Or any other way to filter the export data?

Are you wanting the contents of the fields, or the text that appears on that card once it’s created? Those might not be different things – but I can’t tell.

Thanks for answering. No, from my perspective those are not different things. Not sure if you mean with or without formatting.

Say I had a deck with only two notes. That would mean four cards, two base and two reverse. They might look like this (card front - card back):

coche - car (base card)
car - coche (reverse card)
comprar - buy (base card)
buy - comprar (reverse card)

And I want to get a simple text file that would look like this:

coche - car
comprar - buy

That’s all. Since my deck contains thousands of notes any manual handling is not reasonable.

Happy for any suggestions.

If it’s just the fields, then exporting the notes as text should give you what you are looking for want. Your CSV file will have one “row” for each note, one “column” for each field (forgive me – I can only think about CSVs as spreadsheets). You just need to delete any headers and any extra columns that were exported.

image

If you’re getting “coche - car” and “car - coche” in 2 separate rows – are you sure that it isn’t 2 separate notes?

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Thank you Danika. But that’s the thing, the deck consists of notes with two cards each since I chose to use a note type with reversed cards. And the export function only exports notes, not cards, which means that both the Spanish-Swedish and the Swedish-Spanish card will get exported. I do get a nice CSV file, but I have to manually remove every other line since I don’t want the reverse card to be included.

Below are the note types in my list and the highlighted one is the one used in the deck. So my question is still: Is there a way to filter out certain card types when exporting or am I bound to always export the whole note?

image

As you have already been told, you can export the entire note and delete everything unnecessary in a couple of clicks.

You are confusing the concept of notes and cards. It is better to write what you need it for.

Those 2 statements are inconsistent. Yes, it is notes are being exported – one row per note – but that CSV has no notion of the cards. The example export I posted above is for a note type that makes 7 cards – it’s still one row per note.

I see that your note type says “(and reversed card)” – but is it named in error (or aspirationally, since the deck author manually entered reverse “notes” to create the 2nd cards)? From there, if you click “Cards” – and open the “Card Type” drop-down at the top – are there 2 cards listed?
image

You can also look at the top of the Browse window and toggle between Cards and Notes modes – Browsing - Anki Manual. Now that we know you have 2420 notes – do you also have 4840 cards?

Yes, if there are really multiple cards for the note type. But it’s never been necessary for me.

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Thank you Danika for you patience!

I just understood why I got the reverse cards as well when I exported. My fault was that I selected the “Cards in plain text” option in the Export format drop down. This produced one row for each card, both the basic and the reverse one. When I select “Notes in plain text” I get only one row per note, which was what I wanted. (And I import the rows into Excel of course.)

Yes I do, here is an example of what it looks like:

Notes with 2 cards

The cards

This is great for creating filtered decks where I can practice in either direction.

Thanks again, guess we have been walking in two different tracks in this issue. Hope you have some more patience to spare for my next inevitable question!

I’m glad you were able to work it out, and I’m sorry we were talking past each other! I should have checked if we had the same starting point. Cheers!

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