Skip to main content

Generate Anki decks programmatically

Project description

genanki: A Library for Generating Anki Decks

genanki allows you to programatically generate decks in Python 3 for Anki, a popular spaced-repetition flashcard program. Please see below for concepts and usage.

This library and its author(s) are not affiliated/associated with the main Anki project in any way.

CI

Notes

The basic unit in Anki is the Note, which contains a fact to memorize. Notes correspond to one or more Cards.

Here's how you create a Note:

my_note = genanki.Note(
  model=my_model,
  fields=['Capital of Argentina', 'Buenos Aires'])

You pass in a Model, discussed below, and a set of fields (encoded as HTML).

Models

A Model defines the fields and cards for a type of Note. For example:

my_model = genanki.Model(
  1607392319,
  'Simple Model',
  fields=[
    {'name': 'Question'},
    {'name': 'Answer'},
  ],
  templates=[
    {
      'name': 'Card 1',
      'qfmt': '{{Question}}',
      'afmt': '{{FrontSide}}<hr id="answer">{{Answer}}',
    },
  ])

This note-type has two fields and one card. The card displays the Question field on the front and the Question and Answer fields on the back, separated by a <hr>. You can also pass a css argument to Model() to supply custom CSS.

You need to pass a model_id so that Anki can keep track of your model. It's important that you use a unique model_id for each Model you define. Use import random; random.randrange(1 << 30, 1 << 31) to generate a suitable model_id, and hardcode it into your Model definition.

Generating a Deck/Package

To import your notes into Anki, you need to add them to a Deck:

my_deck = genanki.Deck(
  2059400110,
  'Country Capitals')

my_deck.add_note(my_note)

Once again, you need a unique deck_id that you should generate once and then hardcode into your .py file.

Then, create a Package for your Deck and write it to a file:

genanki.Package(my_deck).write_to_file('output.apkg')

You can then load output.apkg into Anki using File -> Import...

Media Files

To add sounds or images, set the media_files attribute on your Package:

my_package = genanki.Package(my_deck)
my_package.media_files = ['sound.mp3', 'images/image.jpg']

media_files should have the path (relative or absolute) to each file. To use them in notes, first add a field to your model, and reference that field in your template:

my_model = genanki.Model(
  1091735104,
  'Simple Model with Media',
  fields=[
    {'name': 'Question'},
    {'name': 'Answer'},
    {'name': 'MyMedia'},                                  # ADD THIS
  ],
  templates=[
    {
      'name': 'Card 1',
      'qfmt': '{{Question}}<br>{{MyMedia}}',              # AND THIS
      'afmt': '{{FrontSide}}<hr id="answer">{{Answer}}',
    },
  ])

Then, set the MyMedia field on your card to [sound:sound.mp3] for audio and <img src="image.jpg"> for images.

You cannot put <img src="{MyMedia}"> in the template and image.jpg in the field. See these sections in the Anki manual for more information: Importing Media and Media & LaTeX.

You should only put the filename (aka basename) and not the full path in the field; <img src="images/image.jpg"> will not work. Media files should have unique filenames.

Note GUIDs

Notes have a guid property that uniquely identifies the note. If you import a new note that has the same GUID as an existing note, the new note will overwrite the old one (as long as their models have the same fields).

This is an important feature if you want to be able to tweak the design/content of your notes, regenerate your deck, and import the updated version into Anki. Your notes need to have stable GUIDs in order for the new note to replace the existing one.

By default, the GUID is a hash of all the field values. This may not be desirable if, for example, you add a new field with additional info that doesn't change the identity of the note. You can create a custom GUID implementation to hash only the fields that identify the note:

class MyNote(genanki.Note):
  @property
  def guid(self):
    return genanki.guid_for(self.fields[0], self.fields[1])

sort_field

Anki has a value for each Note called the sort_field. Anki uses this value to sort the cards in the Browse interface. Anki also is happier if you avoid having two notes with the same sort_field, although this isn't strictly necessary. By default, the sort_field is the first field, but you can change it by passing sort_field= to Note() or implementing sort_field as a property in a subclass (similar to guid).

You can also pass sort_field_index= to Model() to change the sort field. 0 means the first field in the Note, 1 means the second, etc.

YAML for Templates (and Fields)

You can create your template definitions in the YAML format and pass them as a str to Model(). You can also do this for fields.

Using genanki inside an Anki addon

genanki supports adding generated notes to the local collection when running inside an Anki 2.1 addon (Anki 2.0 may work but has not been tested). See the .write_to_collection_from_addon() method.

CLOZE_MODEL DeprecationWarning

Due to a mistake, in genanki versions before 0.13.0, builtin_models.CLOZE_MODEL only had a single field, whereas the real Cloze model that is built into Anki has two fields. If you get a DeprecationWarning when using CLOZE_MODEL, simply add another field (it can be an empty string) when creating your Note, e.g.

my_note = genanki.Note(
  model=genanki.CLOZE_MODEL,
  fields=['{{c1::Rome}} is the capital of {{c2::Italy}}', ''])

FAQ

My field data is getting garbled

If fields in your notes contain literal <, >, or & characters, you need to HTML-encode them: field data is HTML, not plain text. You can use the html.escape function.

For example, you should write

fields=['AT&amp;T was originally called', 'Bell Telephone Company']

or

fields=[html.escape(f) for f in ['AT&T was originally called', 'Bell Telephone Company']]

This applies even if the content is LaTeX; for example, you should write

fields=['Piketty calls this the "central contradiction of capitalism".', '[latex]r &gt; g[/latex]']

Publishing to PyPI

If your name is Kerrick, you can publish the genanki package to PyPI by running these commands from the root of the genanki repo:

rm -rf dist/*
python3 setup.py sdist bdist_wheel
python3 -m twine upload dist/*

Note that this directly uploads to prod PyPI and skips uploading to test PyPI.

Project details


Download files

Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages.

Source Distribution

genanki-0.13.1.tar.gz (23.3 kB view details)

Uploaded Source

Built Distribution

genanki-0.13.1-py3-none-any.whl (16.2 kB view details)

Uploaded Python 3

File details

Details for the file genanki-0.13.1.tar.gz.

File metadata

  • Download URL: genanki-0.13.1.tar.gz
  • Upload date:
  • Size: 23.3 kB
  • Tags: Source
  • Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? No
  • Uploaded via: twine/4.0.2 CPython/3.11.6

File hashes

Hashes for genanki-0.13.1.tar.gz
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 84d090423a8879520465bfe9784083edacb8d35e2ba511fa5a1bdef01d8f71ed
MD5 a38b00cd173909326cb49fc32b222adb
BLAKE2b-256 e6074459ffd44e8abfd52743f915ab6c0d4c227ee9da3f7f649c930146a93438

See more details on using hashes here.

File details

Details for the file genanki-0.13.1-py3-none-any.whl.

File metadata

  • Download URL: genanki-0.13.1-py3-none-any.whl
  • Upload date:
  • Size: 16.2 kB
  • Tags: Python 3
  • Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? No
  • Uploaded via: twine/4.0.2 CPython/3.11.6

File hashes

Hashes for genanki-0.13.1-py3-none-any.whl
Algorithm Hash digest
SHA256 65b59434008588a1213b940474d1aca8cca83243af6fc0e26200b560efe4d9e3
MD5 bbf179258ac1d88e80fb1c7ce4dbcdb3
BLAKE2b-256 af7e6c74ea7aaf2a36fd7df281267fade72e1f06ed1e44315bd77af2c6f82800

See more details on using hashes here.

Supported by

AWS AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Datadog Monitoring Fastly Fastly CDN Google Google Download Analytics Microsoft Microsoft PSF Sponsor Pingdom Pingdom Monitoring Sentry Sentry Error logging StatusPage StatusPage Status page