TOPIC:

I understand. I will save any code that I introduce so as to be able to reintroduce it if necessary. But is there a reason why the program doesn't already enable to option to ignore punctuation and additional spaces. i.e. will I cause a new problem by introducing code to strip out the punctuation?

I think it's just that no one has requested that functionality before! When I've seen this page used it normally has very short answers where you wouldn't expect a long answer with punctuation to be entered anyway. If you add some functionality to the model file that does then you can feed this back to us if you'd like it to be considered for inclusion in the main Xerte code.

By the way, this may not solve your problem but you can set up multiple correct answers in this page by entering each answer separated by a comma in the answer fields. For example, if you enter 'don't,do not' in the answer field then both do not and don't will be accepted as correct answers.

Thank you so much Fay. I am a language teacher and I am using this module for translation (The target language is a right-to-left language so I have to insert css styling for that . Here is a hypothetical sentence to translate: "Tom, please tell me if he'll be coming!" So I do insert multiple possible "legal" answers. For example, instead of tell me, "let me know" instead of he'll, allow he will. But students fuss and rage over a period instead of an exclamation point, or a comma or an inadvertent extra space. So I don't mind the task of typing as many possible translation equivalents as I can come up with but I want to eliminate the issue of punctuation and extra spaces. I am an old Authorware user and I saw that Xerte's roots have a connection to Authorware. I would love to see that old but wonderful tool given new life via Xerte. I feel fortunate to be able to use Xerte now. I am not a programmer. I did discover how to remove characters and spaces using regex and now I'll try to figure out how to insert that code in the xerte module.
Jonathan