New Quizzes: regular expression answers in FITB questions

[PatrickCoin]

Not a question, but a solution! I had asked about this previously, but cannot find that thread, so am starting a new one.

In the fill-in-the-blank (FITB) question type of New Quizzes, I would like to be able to do the following things all at once:

1. Make answers case sensitive or not (usually NOT)
2. Make the answers insensitive to white space, especially leading or trailing.
3. Provide alternate correct answers.

This had looked like a job for the regular expression option, but I was not able to configure it correctly. I did some web searches and experimented today, and am now able to make it behave as desired. A simple example follows:

Question Stem:
What is your favorite color? `blue`

1-Case sensitivity (NOT)

Using the Open Entry, Regular Expression Match option in Canvas, I enter these regular expressions as the answer:

1a-For capitalization insensitivity.
[Bb]lue
Scores Blue or blue correct.

1b-Any case is good with proper spelling:
[Bb][Ll][Uu][Ee]
Scores blue, Blue, BLUE, BlUE, etc., correct.

2-Apparently white space is not an issue. The regular expression option seems to ignore leading and trailing white spaces. I have not tested this extensively, but it works when I test it.

3a-Alternate answer (OR conditional):
blue|green
Scores either blue or green correct.

3b-Combination of case and alternate answer.
[Bb][Ll][Uu][Ee]|[Gg][Rr][Ee][Ee][Nn]

Scores Blue, blue, BLUE, BluE, etc., OR Green, green, GReeN, etc. correct.

The software can be made to do what I want, and I am quite happy about about this. Perhaps Instructure people will be comment and formulate a help document to assist us on the instructional side? I may not have covered all the useful options, but it is a start.

[ryancnutt]

I'm not 100%, but you should be able to use the case insensitive regex flag like (?i)blue to match any combination of BluE. Pretty sure I've done that in Canvas before. 

Using \s+ instead of spaces will let them enter any number of spaces. So blue\s+duck will match blue duck and also blue                     duck.

[PatrickCoin]

Thanks so much for this information! Update to my previous reply, testing a couple of things:

(?i)blue works--blue, BLUE, BLue, etc. are scored correct.

blue\s+duck does not seem to work. "blue duck" is scored correct, but "blueduck" is scored incorrect.

The expression "blue\s*duck" seems to work. Either "blue duck" or "blueduck" is scored correct.

[ryancnutt]

Right. The + means one or more, the * means 0 or more. I usually use \s+ any time I need spaces, but don't care about how many there are. 

[PatrickCoin]

Oh, very good, thanks for sharing your expertise. I'm piecing this all together based on where I want to go. I'm a biologist, (sort-of),  with limited experience in programming tools. I'm old enough, too, that virtually no computer programming, etc., was taught in my secondary and college education unless one was a computer science major. (Further hilarity, computer science was just part of electrical engineering in my undergraduate years!)