Programming

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.replace(b'\xc3\xa0', b'\xd0\xb5')
   # correct error where latin accented ý is used
   b = b.replace(b'\xc3\xbd', b'\xd1\x83')
   # remove combining diacritical mark
   b = b.replace(b'\xcc\x81',b'').decode()
   return b

text = "Том столкну́л Мэри с трампли́на для прыжко́в в во́ду."

print(strip_stress_marks(text))
# prints "Том столкнул Мэри с трамплина для прыжков в воду."

The approach is similar to the Perl-based tool we constructed before, but this time we are working working on the bytes object after encoding as utf-8. Since the bytes object has a replace method, we can use that to do all of the work. The first 4 replacements all deal with edge cases where accented Latin characters are use to show the placement of syllabic stress instead of the Cyrillic character plus the combining diacritical mark. In these cases, we just need to substitute the proper Cyrillic character. Then we just strip out the “combining acute accent” U+301 → \xcc\x81 in UTF-8. After these replacements, we just decode the bytes object back to a str.

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. For example, a cloze deletion note type with the following content requires the learner to supply the missing word:

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 2.1.41 does not.
• After Auto Markdown stopped working, I installed the supposed fix Auto Markdown - fix version but that didn’t work either.
• It’s possible that the Mini Format Pack will work, but honestly I’m tired of the constant break-fix-break-fix cycle with Anki.

The problem

The real problem with Markdown add-ons for Anki is the same as every other add-on. They are all hanging by a thread. Almost every minor point upgrade of Anki breaks at least one of my add-ons. It’s nearly impossible to determine in advance whether an Anki upgrade is going to break some key functionality that I rely on. And add-on developers, even prominent and prolific ones come and go when they get busy, distracted or disinterested. It’s one of the most frustrating parts of using Anki.

W3schools.com has a CSS library that’s quite nice. I often use Bootstrap; but I like some of the visual features here better. For example, I like their tags because they have more flexible use of colour.

If you want to fetch from a Python dictionary, but you need a default value, this is how you do it:

upos_badge = {'noun': 'lime','verb': 'amber', 'adv': 'blue',}
badge_class_postfix = upos_badge.get(value.lower(), 'light-grey')

I recently learned about DeepL as an alternative to Google Translate. It seems really good.

Recently I hit an extra digit when setting up a custom new card session and was stuck with hundreds of new cards to review. Desparate to fix this, I started poking around the Anki collection SQLite database, I found the collection data responsible for the extra cards. In the col table, find the newToday key and you’ll find the extra card count expressed as a negative integer. Just change that to zero and you’ll be good.