Web2Anki

This tool transforms tables online from sites such as Wikipedia and Quizlet into Anki decks. Anki is a free and open-source flashcards program that utilizes spaced-recognition to improve memory and retention of learned materials.

Development

Web2Anki has not been extensively tested yet, so I encourage you check back over your deck in the end to ensure all data has been transferred accurately and appropriately. Furthermore Web2Anki lacks frontends for sites besides Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and Quizlet. If you would like other sites to be supported, I'm open to pull requests. Because this was built more for myself than for general use I haven't really put much thought into usability and flexibility of the program. However I have made a few efforts to make the code sort of readable so feel free to modify it for your own purposes, or import web2anki.py into your own program and use the functions I have already written.

Setting up

Download this repository to your computer, either via

git clone https://github.com/brandon-gong/web2anki

or by downloading the zip and decompressing it on your computer.

This tool relies on a number of 3rd-party packages installed from pip; therefore, before you run this program you must first install those packages.

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

All set.

Usage

./web2anki.py <web-url> <front-format> <back-format> <deck-name> <output-name>

Where:

• web-url is the copied link to the webpage containing the table you want to transcribe, including protocol (ex. https://)
• front-format and back-format are all HTML strings that can and should include one or more extra variables surrouded by double curly braces. These variables, for an n-columned table, include FrontSide, col0, col1, col2, ..., col(n-1).
• deck-name is the name of the deck as it will appear in Anki once imported.
• output-name is the output name of your file. Please include the .apkg extension in this argument.

After running, open Anki and use File > Import to import the generated apkg file into the program.

Example usage

Suppose we have this table that we would like to transcribe to Anki:

Atomic number	Element name	Symbol	Origin of name
1	Hydrogen	H	Greek elements hydro- and -gen, meaning 'water-forming'
2	Helium	He	Greek hḗlios, 'sun'
3	Lithium	Li	Greek líthos, 'stone'
4	Beryllium	Be	beryl, a mineral (ultimately from the name of Belur in southern India)
5	Boron	B	borax, a mineral (from Arabic bawraq)
and 112 more rows...

Clearly 118 rows of elements will be extraordinarily difficult and tedious to manually transcribe, and also open up the likelihood of human error. Luckily, this is a case where Web2Anki will be very handy in assisting the transcription.

On the front of the card we want the element name; on the back, the symbol. Easy enough. The command is:

./web2anki.py https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_elements "{{col1}}" "{{FrontSide}}<br>{{col2}}" "Element Names and Symbols" output.apkg`

(./web2anki.py and python3 web2anki.py are interchangeable)

Notice the usage of {{FrontSide}}. {{FrontSide}} is special variable that contains all of the HTML code for the front of the card; in this case, it would be equivalent to the second argument, "{{col1}}". It's sole purpose is to help reduce the amount you have to repeat yourself.

Let's say we want to display the atomic number on the front of the card, in big bold text, and on the back we want to add the atomic name and origin. What's the command? Simply modifying arguments 2 and 3 gives:

./web2anki.py https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_elements "<h1>{{col0}}</h1>" "{{FrontSide}}<br>{{col1}}, originating from {{col3}}" "Element Names and Symbols" output.apkg`

Clearly you will need some basic understanding of how to use html tags to achieve more complex formatting. A quick crash course:

• Wrap text you want to format in a certain way in tags
• These tags include <i> for italic, <b> for bold, <h1>, <h2>, <h3> for progressively smaller headers and subheaders, and <sup>, <sub> for superscripts and subscripts respectively.
• For example: <i>Hello</i> this <b>is an</b> <sup>example</sup> will give Hello this is an ^example.
• Furthermore, you can create newlines using the <br> tag.

For more help on HTML formatting, there's this thing called Google that will be able to guide you.

Issues, Feature requests

Unfortunately, as this was just a quick little tool I built to help myself, I am not super interested in spending more time than needed implementing support for more websites that I will never use myself. If you want support for those sites, you will have to implement that yourself. However, I am open to fixing small bugs or cases that won't take too much of my time.