ForumsQuestionsImport of Evernote text files


Import of Evernote text files
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mr_many_notes

Posted: Nov 13, 2008
Score: 0 Reference
I have grown sick and tired of Evernotes inability to properly handle the offline notes issue, and am delighted to find the toodledo application. I now have the tricky problem of exporting all my text notes from Evernote to get them into toodledo. The only export formats available are: ENEX (proprietory format), TXT (but I tried this and it imports into toodledo as one todo per line of text, e.g. 2 notes with 5 lines each would end up as 10 different todo items in toodledo), HTML, HTML complete.

Any ideas?

Thanks!
Jake

Toodledo Founder
Posted: Nov 13, 2008
Score: 0 Reference
If you export as TXT, you should then be able to import this into a spreadsheet like Excel and then export again as a CSV file, which is what Toodledo needs to import.

Hope that helps.
mr_many_notes

Posted: Nov 14, 2008
Score: 0 Reference
I have tried to do as suggested, but the TXT format is a really dumb format and my notes contain line-breaks, so they end up only being able to be imported on mutiple lines.

I think the best solution is to figure out how to import from the Evernote XML format (.ENEX); I've had a little look, but can't figure out what I need to do.

What would be nice if we could import directly from the ENEX files (Evernote XML) into Toodledo (since your tech guys are clearly going to be better than I at this sort of stuff). Any chance? Even better would be if I knew you could add this like next week, coz then I wouldn't need to figure a fudge out myself. Thanks!
dirtbagg

Posted: Nov 14, 2008
Score: 0 Reference
I'd like to ditto mr many notes. I work on a Mac which is not so CSV savy as a PC. What wouldn't I give for some more powerful import/export functions or, dare I hope, a desktop application?
mr_many_notes

Posted: Nov 17, 2008
Score: 1 Reference
I've managed to create a kludge to get my Evernote notes into the Tasks of Toodledo.

If you are a techie, you'll probably laugh at my technique and know a much better way to do it, so this won't be much good to you.

If you aren't a techie, you probably won't understand my technique and so it won't be much good to you.

In any case, you'd have to be as desperate as me to get your notes across from Evernote to Toodledo to use it, but, for what it's worth, here is what I did.

1) Exported the 318 notes which I had uniquely in Evernote into the Evernote .ENEX format (fortunately my other 6500 notes were in Outlook, which I could export easily to Toodledo).

2) Transformed these notes into a very simple HTML page with 2 columns: note title and note content (I learned what little I know about XML from http://www.w3schools.com/XML/xml_xsl.asp). I will append the XSLT which I used to the end of this post.

3) Loaded this HTML page into Microsoft Excel (giving me 2 columns)

4) Used Excel to export these two columns to CSV format

5) Used the Toodledo "Import CSV to Task" function to import this file, taking "Title" into the Task title field, and the "Content" into the Task notes field.

You'll see it's a real kludge. The annoying problem is that the text in the "Notes" field is still surrounded with tags such as <div>. Nonetheless, the whole content is transfered, so at least I don't have to retype them!

At the start of the Evernote XML file (.ENEX) I added the line:
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="transform_to_html.xsl"?>

The "transform_to_html.xsl" XSLT which I used:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:template match="/">
<html>

<h2>My Evernotes</h2>
<table border="1">
<tr bgcolor="#9acd32">
<th align="left">Title</th>
<th align="left">Content</th>
</tr>
<xsl:for-each select="en-export/note">
<tr>
<td><xsl:value-of select="title"/></td>
<td><xsl:value-of select="content"/></td>
</tr>
</xsl:for-each>
</table>

</html>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Good luck!!


This message was edited Nov 17, 2008.
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