py-quizlet-cram

A package for taking Quizlet and Cram quizzes in Python.

Introduction

The purpose of this package is to enable users to take online quizzes from Quizlet and Cram in Jupyter Notebook. Quizzes are web scraped from these websites based on the provided topic and card set number. Questions and answers are shown interatively, with the user selecting whether they got each question right or wrong. A pie chart showing the quiz results is plotted upon quiz completion.

Please note the list of dependencies in the dependencies.txt file.

If at any time the webscraping functions timeout or fail, close the browser that was automatically opened, and run the command again. This usually fixes any issues.

A video demonstrating the use of this package can be found at this link.

Creating a Quiz() object

In order to create a quiz object, the user should assign Quiz() to a variable.

quiz1 = Quiz()

(Quizzes can be created without assigning to a variable, but then once the quiz is completed, you will not be able to access object attributes.)

Upon creating a Quiz(), the first function called is internet_checker.

internet_checker

Since this package requires an internet connection, it does not make sense to try to create the Quiz() object without internet access. This function checks whether or not the user has an internet connection, and will abort Quiz() creation if they do not.

options_setter

This function is called to set all the quiz options, which are stored as Quiz() attributes. The structure of this function is a complex cascade of loops. Once the user has changed any/all options as they desire (defaults are also provided), they can type 'start' to begin taking the quiz.

After the options are set and the user types 'start', the quiz is created via network functions.

quiz_create

This function calls the appropriate webscraping methods depending on the site entered by the user in settings (ie. Quizlet or Cram). Once the dataframe of questions and answers has been created, it calls translate from the network subpackage (only if the language has been set to French or Chinese) which translates the questions and answers to the appropriate language. Lastly, this function calls the QA_constructor function to create the array of QA() objects.

speed_warning

Before beginning to webscrape the quiz, an internet speed warning is printed. This warning tells the user that "Functions requiring internet connection may take a while. Please do not interact with your device until the process is finished". This ensures a smooth quiz creation without any interuptions.

url_cram and url_quizlet

In order to webscrape the questions, an appropriate search URL must be constructed. These functions take in the topic as a string, replace the spaces with dashes (Quizlet) or addition signs (Cram) and concatenate them with the default search URL.

This URL is then passed to the webscraping functions.

webscrape_quizlet and webscrape_cram

These functions take the URL from the previous functions and query the appropriate website using 'Selenium' headless browsing package (anti-robot server properties prevented traditional webscraping techniques). Once the page has finished loading, the function finds the link to the appropriate card set (based on setNum). This may take several moments, as the loading of the ads makes the process much slower (this is especially true for Cram quizzes).

Next, this link is used to open a second browser that is specific to the desired cardset. The function then finds all the questions and answers to the cards, and assigns them to separate arrays.

Lastly, the dataframe_builder function is called, which puts the two arrays of questions and answers into a single pandas dataframe, which is returned and assigned to the Quiz() attribute .__array.

translate

Before the .__array of questions and answers are sorted into QA() objects, if the user selected a language other than English, the array is passed to translate. This function uses the convinient googletrans package to iteratively translate each cell in the question answer dataframe stored in .__array (overwriting contents with new text).

QA_constructor

The final step of quiz creation is to assign each question-answer pair in the .__array attribute to a separate QA() object. Each QA() object contains a single question, answer, quiz topic, and a mark attribute that stores an r if the user answered the question correct, or a w if the user answered the question incorrectly. After the QA_constructor creates the appropriate number of QA() objects, it assigns them to an array which is then stored inside the Quiz() attribute .QAs.

Taking a Quiz

Once a quiz has been created, it automatically begins after the user types 'start' in the options menu. This calls the take_the_quiz() function.

print_options

Upon calling take_the_quiz() on a Quiz() object, the first function to run is print_options. This function prints the options of the quiz that is about to be taken.

Main Loop

The main loop of the take_the_quiz() function does the following steps:

1. Print the question, then prompt the user for input.
2. If the user types 'hint', the hints function is called.
3. If the user hits the 'enter' key, the answer is printed.
4. If the .results attribute is set to 'on', the user is asked if they understood the concept or not. This input is used later by results_plot.
5. Return to step 1 if there are more questions.
6. Once all questions have been asked, print "Well done! Quiz is finished".
7. If displayResults is on, results_plot is called.

hints

This function is called whenever the user types 'hint' while taking a quiz. In order to provide the user a hint, this function randomly displays some of the words in the answer, hiding the rest of the words with underscores. Because the number of words revealed is random, the hint might give away all the words except one, or may only show one word.

results_plot

If on, this function prints the # of questions answered correctly, # of questions answered incorrectly, a percentage grade, and a pie chart showing the results.