QB Answer Checker

A package to automatically check/judge answers against quizbowl answerlines. Mostly used in conjunction with qbreader to automatically check answers.

Answerline Specification

This section specifies the kind of (quizbowl) answerlines that the program is designed to parse.

Answerlines should be formatted as follows:

<main answerline> [<sub-answerline>]

where the sub-answerline is a string of clauses separated by semicolons of the form:

(<special directives>;)? <clause> (; <clause>; ...)?

where each clause is a string of answers separated by the word "or" of the form:

<directive>? (on)? <answer>((or|,) <answer>(or|,) <answer> ...)? (by asking|with <directed prompt>)?

Deprecated: answers can also be separated by commas instead of "or", but this is deprecated and serves mostly to support old answerlines.

Each directive should be one of:

• "accept"
• "prompt"
• "reject"
• "anti-prompt"
  • some sets use "antiprompt" (no hyphen)

and "on" and "by asking/with" are optional and indicate that there should be a directed prompt.

Special Directives

Special directives should be one of the following and affect the main answerline only:

• "accept either" or "accept any": accept any individual word of the main answer
  • For example, if the entire answerline is <b><u>Grover Underwood</u></b> [accept either], then "Grover", "Underwood", and "Grover Underwood" would be accepted.
• "prompt on partial": prompt on any individual word of the main answer
  • For example: <b><u>John</u></b> [prompt on partial] would prompt on "John" and "John Smith", but not "John Smithson".

Note: special directives should be the first phrase in the sub-answerline, but this program will recognize them anywhere in the sub-answerline.

Additional Info

For more information about how answerlines should be formatted, see https://minkowski.space/quizbowl/manuals/style/answerlines.html. Note that the linked guide is more useful for explaining how answerlines should be formatted from a sylistic/quizbowl sense, while this specification only describes how they should be formatted in a way that computers can understand.