Export to CSV and Ship

writing an Anki-ready CSV

Part of: Flashcard Maker

The deck is extracted, deduped, and validated. Now make it usable : write it to a CSV file that imports straight into Anki, Quizlet, or a spreadsheet. Getting the file format exactly right is what turns your script into a tool someone else can actually run. Why CSV, and why it's trickier than it looks Anki imports a plain CSV: one row per card, question in the first column, answer in the second. The catch is that flashcard text is full of the characters CSV uses as control codes, commas, quotes, and newlines. A question like Say "hi", then wave naively written as Say "hi", then wave,answer has a stray comma that splits it into the wrong columns. You must escape those fields. The rule (RFC 4180): if a field contains a comma, a double-quote, or a newline, wrap the whole field in double-quotes and double any interior quotes. Python's csv module does this correctly so you never hand-roll it: csv.writer handles every escaping edge case, quotes, commas, newlines inside a field, so Say "hi", then wave lands in exactly one column. The newline="" argument is required on the open call; without it you get blank rows between cards on some platforms. The finished pipeline Every piece from the l

Challenge: Escape the CSV Row