How ExamParser Turns Messy Word, PDF, and Google Docs Into Quiz Question Banks

The author built ExamParser, a tool that converts Word, PDF, and Google Docs files into Canvas-ready quizzes without requiring a login. The core challenge is that documents have no native concept of questions, so the parser must infer questions, types, and answers from layout, styling, and authoring conventions. The pipeline extracts format-specific blocks, normalizes them into a shared schema, segments them into questions, classifies question types, and emits QTI or spreadsheet output. For Word files, paragraph styles and list markers provide cues, while PDFs rely on character coordinates to detect columns and option labels, and scanned PDFs require OCR. The post also explains how a tolerant regular expression detects numbered question starts across inconsistent formats.