SuperMemo to Anki database converter...

My girlfriend recently decided to move her study materials from SuperMemo to Anki, due to Anki's better support for Mac and a superior iPhone app that allows study cards to contain media such as images and sound.

However, she faced the prospect of losing all her learning history on thousands of cards, which would have meant unnecessary repetitions as Anki rebuilt her learning database.

Thankfully I found this useful project on GitHub:

https://github.com/ggodlewski/smux-anki-converter

It's a java program that converts the SuperMemo UX course data into Anki format. It seems to have been written to work on courses published from the SuperMemo website - but when I tried it on her data and it failed :(

It parses the supermemo SMPAK file, which is akin to the MS compound document file, ie: a single file which contains multiple streams of data. The course data is found in the course.xml and item####.xml streams in the SMPAK file. However, it seems that self created supermemo courses actually store the course data as XML files in a subdirectory called "override"- with the same names as the streams in the SMPAK file.

Grzegorz Godlewski's code did all the heavy lifting of parsing the course data and repetitions and then writing the data in Anki format. All I had to do was make a small change to first look on the filesystem for the courses xml files.


The only problem was I'm not a java programmer - C++ and C# are my areas of expertise, so I was forced to download the JDK, Eclipse and Maven and see what I could do. It was suprisingly not too painful... and I managed to knock up something that worked.


You can find my efforts here on GitHub:


https://github.com/pceccato/smux-anki-converter

Thanks to Gregorz for his hard work and sharing his code with the world!

Welcome

Welcome to my first ever blog post.

I finally decided to create this blog as a way to keep track of all those annoying issues that get in your way whilst programming and their resolutions, and also other computer and tech related stuff.

I hope that someone else may find some of this information useful...