Moodle questions with symbols not importing correctly

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Nancy_Webb_CCSF
Community Champion

An instructor imported the complete Moodle backup of his course into Canvas, an .mbz file.  He thought the questions in quizzes and also in question banks came through correctly without checking each one.  It turns out that answers that included certain characters ( < > etc.) didn't import correctly.  I believe it's related to Canvas answers not having HTML formatting.  In Moodle, > is stored as HTML &gt;.  But it's odd that some answers with those characters did import.  An answer containing >=3) came over correctly, whereas <3) and <=3) didn't.  I checked in the original Moodle and they all used the HTML character code for < and >.

For example, one answer had <3) at the end.  All of the answer's text including and after ❤️ didn't transfer, just the text before it.  I know ❤️ becomes a heart emoji in certain editors, and I'm wondering if that caused a problem either during the backup process in Moodle or importing into Canvas.

But it might be that Canvas import has a bug that handles &gt: but not &lt;  Perhaps it thinks < is the start of an HTML tag and ignores it?  Is there anyone technical who knows how HTML is stripped out of answers to questions?

Any ideas?  Have other math/programming/technical instructors encountered this?  Is there a way to export/import questions so this won't happen?

1 Solution
tross
Community Champion

When we brought everything over from Moodle, we recommended that teachers review everything.   We found it was sometimes the sequence of characters that would cause something to not come over cleanly.  I know our teachers really did not want to review the material but we found it is a risk not to do so.

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