Issue with Including a Colon in H5P Fill-in-the-Blank (Cloze) Tasks

Submitted by thorstenatschool on Mon, 10/21/2024 - 09:04
Forums: 
Content creation

Hi everyone,

I’m currently working on a fill-in-the-blank (cloze) activity using H5P. According to the instructions, I can use a colon : before a word to provide a hint in the blank. However, I need to include a colon as part of the correct answer within the blank itself, but whenever I do this, it still interprets the colon as a hint instead of as part of the answer.

Here’s an example of what I’m trying to achieve:

When we want to output something in a program, we write the keyword *Output:Output* in the flowchart instruction.

In this case, the colon is an essential part of the answer, but H5P shows a hint instead of treating it as part of the correct response. I've tried escaping the colon with a backslash (e.g., \:), but it didn’t work.

Does anyone have suggestions or workarounds for including a colon inside a fill-in-the-blank answer without it being interpreted as a hint?

Thanks in advance for your help!

papi Jo's picture

papi Jo

Mon, 10/21/2024 - 15:52

This is one of those small but irritating bugs that would be easy to fix, that keep being reported but are never fixed. See here: https://h5ptechnology.atlassian.net/browse/HFP-1743 where you'll see it's been reported quite a few times since 2018.

In the meantime I am suggesting a workaround which is not terribly user-friendly but hopefully might help. In your blank, if you need to use a colon, instead of using the "normal" colon (which will trigger a hint message) you have a choice of using 2 different colons:

  • the Full width colon Unicode Character “：” (U+FF1A)
  • the small colonUnicode Character “﹕” (U+FE55)

Using either one of those in your blank text will work and still make available the use of the normal colon for hints. I am attaching a screenshot and an example of h5p content for you to examine. Hope that helps!

 

 

 

 

H5P file: 
Binary Data fill-in-the-blanks-36.h5p

thorstenatschool

Wed, 10/23/2024 - 11:12

Thank you for the helpful suggestion regarding alternative Unicode characters for the colon. It works perfectly!

I’m guessing that this issue might also apply to the asterisk (*) in "Drag the Words." Could the same workaround be used for this as well?

Thanks again for your help!

thorstenatschool

Wed, 10/23/2024 - 11:13

Thank you for the helpful suggestion regarding alternative Unicode characters for the colon. It works perfectly!

I’m guessing that this issue might also apply to the asterisk (*) in "Drag the Words." Could the same workaround be used for this as well?

Thanks again for your help!

papi Jo's picture

papi Jo

Wed, 10/23/2024 - 23:08

Please provide an example of using an asterisk inside a blank in the H5P Fill in the Blanks activity. Do you need it for the maths symbol for multiplication? or something else?

papi Jo's picture

papi Jo

Thu, 10/24/2024 - 09:07

Sorry, I had not seen you asked for the Drag into text activity. Please provide some examples of using asterisk in that type of activity so I can provide a solution.