"error/There are no words" in Hangman

"error/There are no words" in Hangman

by Stefan Oertel -
Number of replies: 4

Hi Vasilis, thank you for this very nice plugin - our pupils love it smile

But in german the hangman game has problems with german umlauts. I created a glossary with the following words (in brackets for you the English word):

Erdöl (petroleum), grün (green), März (March), Straße (street), Übung (exercise)

If I create a hangman game basing on this glossary and try it to start, it gives me the error "There are no words". The letters ä, Ä, ö, Ö, ü, Ü and ß are the cause, but often used in german words sad If I add another word to the glossary without one of these letters, everything is fine but the game uses only this word. A possible solution could be (standard solution in the german version of hangman) to replace these letters by two letters:

Ü, ü => UE (=> GRUEN, UEBUNG)

Ö, ö => OE (=> ERDOEL)

Ä, ä => AE (=> MAERZ)

ß => SS (=> STRASSE)

What do you think, is it possible? 

Thanks, Stefan

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In reply to Stefan Oertel

Re: "error/There are no words" in Hangman

by Vasilis Daloukas -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers

Tha alphabet for German language in the hangman is

$string['lettersall'] = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ';

All the alphabet is shown in the bottom.

Do yoy mean that the correct alphabet is

$string['lettersall'] = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZÜÖÄß';

???

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In reply to Vasilis Daloukas

Re: "error/There are no words" in Hangman

by Stefan Oertel -

Hi Vasilis,

yes, a typical German word can consist of 30 different letters. Look here http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsches_Alphabet and here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_alphabet. (AB...XYZ and ÄÖÜß)

The easiest way would be to customize the "lettersall" parameter in the language file, but it only works for the ß (the letter is shown now at the bottom and the game works with the word "Straße"). The other three Ö, Ü, Ä are ignored and words with these letters too. I don't know why. Any idea? Is the order important (...XYZÜÖÄß or ...XYZßÄÖÜ or ...)?

Does the adaptation of the "lettersall" parameter affect any other game?

Thanks, Stefan


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In reply to Vasilis Daloukas

Re: "error/There are no words" in Hangman

by Stefan Oertel -

Hi Vasilis,

the problem was the language text caching mechanism.

If I disable the option "Cache all language strings (langstringcache)" and edit the language file game.php in the moodledata directory (parameter letterall to 'AÄBCDEFGHIJKLMNOÖPQRSTUÜVWXYZß'), everything is fine:

Game hangman with German umlauts

After that I can enable the text caching again. Do I have to do this with every update? Does the adaptation of the "lettersall" parameter affect any other game?

Thanks again and σας ευχαριστώ, Stefan

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In reply to Stefan Oertel

Re: "error/There are no words" in Hangman

by Stefan Oertel -

Hi Vasilis, 

I've checked all the other games and there are no problems after changing the lettersall parameter to AÄBCDEFGHIJKLMNOÖPQRSTUÜVWXYZß in the German language file. But I found another problem in the game crossword (not the same reason => another post).

Ralf Krause, the German translator, has changed the parameter in the official German language file. Therefore there will be no problems with future updates.

Thanks again, Stefan

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