quiz-text

💡Quick and easy markup for quizzes!

Install

npm install --save quiz-text

Usage

Loosely based on Petr Trofimov's Quiztext, this is a library that allows you to write quizzes using a markdown-like syntax which gets parsed into JSON. It supports radio (one selection), checkbox (multi select), and range (one selection, with syntactical sugar) questions, and looks like this:

Question 1: Why would I use this?
( ) You want to easily write quizzes that can be parsed into JavaScript
(*) Some questions might have a right answer
(different-value) Answers might have different values than labels

What about checkboxes?
[ ] Write checkbox ("multi-select") questions with square brackets
[*] These can have...
[*] Multiple right answers, or just one
[*other-val] They can also have different values than labels

And Ranges? How cool are they on a scale of 1 to 10?
{1-10} Dad With a Rat Tail | Astronaut On A Skateboard

These would get parsed into friendly JSON:

[{
  question: 'Question 1: Why would I use this?',
  type: 'radio',
  answers: [{
    name: 'You want to easily write quizzes that can be parsed into JavaScript',
    value: 'You want to easily write quizzes that can be parsed into JavaScript'
  }, {
    name: 'Some questions might have a right answer',
    value: 'Some questions might have a right answer',
    correct: true
  }, {
    name: 'Answers might have different values than labels',
    value: 'different-value'
  }]
}, {
  question: 'What about multi-select?',
  type: 'checkbox',
  answers: [{
    name: 'Write multi-select (colloquially "checkbox") questions with square brackets',
    value: 'Write multi-select (colloquially "checkbox") questions with square brackets'
  }, {
    name: 'These can have...',
    value: 'These can have...',
    correct: true
  }, {
    name: 'Multiple right answers, or just one',
    value: 'Multiple right answers, or just one',
    correct: true
  }, {
    name: 'They can also have different values than labels',
    value: 'other-val',
    correct: true
  }]
}, {
  question: 'And Ranges? How cool are they on a scale of 1 to 10?',
  type: 'range',
  leftText: 'Dad With a Rat Tail',
  rightText: 'Astronaut On A Skateboard'
  answers: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
}]

Radio and Checkbox

Radio buttons and checkboxes are denoted by parenthesis ( ) and square brackets [ ], respectively. Answers don't need to be correct or incorrect, but you may denote one or more correct answers by putting an asterisk * inside the parenthesis/brackets.

TIP: Don't specify more than one correct answer for radio questions, unless you allow your users to select more than one answer in your UI. Radio questions are intended to be single-select, whereas checkbox questions are intended to be multi-select. Currently there's no difference in their parsed output, but this might change in a future major version.

You may optionally have a different value for an answer than the text to the right of the parenthesis/brackets. To do so, add those values inside them (after the asterisk, for correct answers).

For multiple choice questions where you would select an answer and get a result of whether you selected a correct or incorrect answer, you may optionally have correct result text and incorrect result text fields. Correct result text is denoted by carets ^ ^, and incorrect result text is denoted by less than symbols < <. These will come before the radio button answers.

Question
(* value1 ) Cool Label 1
(value2) Cool Label 2

Multiple choice question with correct and incorrect text
^That's the correct answer^
<Incorrect, the right answer was actually Cool Label 1<
(* value1 ) Cool Label 1
(value2) Cool Label 2

Don't worry about whitespace. All values and labels will be trimmed when parsed.

Range

Range is similar to radio, but it's a syntactical sugar for specifying questions where the answers are simply a range between two numbers. They can go either direction, and you can also specify each number individually. Ranges are denoted by curly brackets { } with pipe-delineated (|) text intended for the left side and right side (and optionally middle) of the question after them.

You may optionally have a category field that would be denoted by dashes (-).

Simple one to five range
{1-5} Less | More

Reverse range, useful for doing different weighting in personality quizzes
{10-0} Cooler | Warmer

You can also add middle text
{1-5} Left | Center | Right

Mix and match commas and hyphens for weird ranges
{1, 1, 2, 3-5} Less | Fibonacci | More

A question with a category
{1-5} Less | More
-A Cool Category-

Contributing

This is an ongoing project, and I'll add more fundamental quiz types as I think of them. The parser (parser.pegjs) uses PEG.js and gets compiled to index.js when testing (and with npm run build). If you find a bug, please submit a PR with a failing unit test (or write a new unit test that captures it) and I'll help diagnose the error.