BUG: course phrases needs to be string trimmed

I’m using the latest version of Memrise on Android (2.9_3861_memrise) and am increasingly frustrated by trailing spaces in course text phrases. I’ll attach screenshots in a moment but in essence the text that Memrise is using has one, or sometimes even two trailing spaces. This doesn’t impact the audio based tests, but has drastic impact on the typing tests.

For example, I’m learning French and it asks me for “you should (informal)”. I type in “tu devrais” which is the correct answer. However Memrise doesn’t recognize it as the correct answer because the text phrase it has stored has a trailing space. Thus if I type in the extra space (ie I type "tu devrais ") then it recognizes it as the correct answer.

This is really frustrating as you don’t always remember which phrases have a trailing space (or two), nor should you have to! Memrise - you need to apply string trimming either to your phrase databases at source, or dynamically at runtime when checking equality to the stored phrase.

As a wider issue I think Memrise should be more lenient with whitespace. For example there are some texts with ellipsis with weird spaces either side. With these you need to precisely type the spaces to get it to recognize the correct answer. Can’t remember a precise example but it’s something like “au … (aux … )” and you need to type the spaces precisely as I have in that string (ie either side of the ellipsis). Seems overly strict and not part of the language.

Here are examples I screen grabbed:

And another example:

That is likely a problem with the course. Which course is it (give a link) ?

Memrise allows “strict typing” for testing on a particular column to be on or off - that’s under the control of the course maintainer. When strict typing is enabled for a column, you have to get whitespace, punctuation, accents, everything, exactly as it is in the course database. Most courses do not have strict typing, so for most courses, whitespace is not significant and you wouldn’t need to type the trailing spaces. But if a course maintainer turned strict typing on, Memrise won’t go against their intent by trimming spaces.

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Many thanks for the reply. The courses I have seen this issue on are “French 1”, “French 2” and “French 3”.

I understand the need for “strict mode” for internal spaces as they can be important in certain circumstances, in particular languages. However I can’t think of a single instance or language where trailing spaces are important. You’d be pretty safe to apply the Java String.trim() generally when doing string comparisons, regardless of strict mode. Worth considering anyway!

Once again thanks for the reply - I wasn’t aware of “strict mode” before - very interesting!

When a course creator has strict mode enabled for a column, it’s probably not a good idea for memrise to second-guess them about which details of the strings to still be lenient about. But a French course probably shouldn’t require strict typing, and if it does, the course maintainer(s) should be careful not to have trailing spaces or other issues like that. But if that’s actually what’s happening here, it’s not a bug in memrise, it’s a problem with the course(s) and should be reported to the course maintainers.

Of course, thanks to memrise shutting down the course forums, there are now a lot more courses where the maintainers cannot be contacted.

Since you’ve seen this problem in what appear to be a series of related courses made by the same person, that’s my guess - that it’s a problem with the course settings or data, not a bug. Try reporting it by posting in the French language category here. Be sure not just to give the names of the courses, but also links!!

Lots of courses have similar names. There’s probably some other “French 1” on memrise besides the one you’re talking about. The one way to be absolutely clear what course you mean is to include the course URL.

If the maintainer sees your post and checks their settings and tells you that they actually do not have strict typing mode enabled, then it’s a memrise bug.

Please don’t use ellipses before or after phrases. They’re completely unnecessary and unhelpful, and only slow the learning process down.

For example, instead of “…et ils vecurent heureux jusqu’a la fin”, just use “et ils vecurent heureux jusqu’a la fin”.

Another problem with ellipses is that they often give the answer away too easily. If a phrase begins with an ellipses, especially in a speed review, it’s super easy to just look for the phrase that begins with an ellipses. In that case, I’m not learning anything.