ever2simple 1.1

Migrate from evernote to simplenote with markdown formatting

Introduction

Evernote and Simplenote are two online based note taking apps. Evernote focuses more on giving the end user rich text and the ability to upload voice clips and images for OCR. Simplenote on the other hand, as seen by its name, is a much simpler approach. It just stores your plain text notes, and that is it.

This package installs a script to help you migrate from Evernote into Simplenote using the standard Simplenote import options. The script will take an Evernote enex export and turn it into a json or csv file compatible with Simplenote.

The html that is provided by Evernote is processed by the html2text library. This transforms the html into Markdown. The Simplenote web UI supports previewing notes in Markdown, so this works out nicely.

Installation

You can easily install this package using easy_install or pip as follows (preferably in a virtualenv):

$ pip install -U ever2simple

Usage

Once it is installed, you will have a new executable available to you. Before you can run the conversion, you will need to export your notes. This can be done from the desktop client. You can select the notes you want to export, then Export Notes to Archive..., and select the enex format.

Once you have that, you can run the script on the file:

$ ever2simple my_evernote.enex > simplenote.json

Right now it just outputs the data to stdout, so you can just output directly to the file of your choosing (in this case simplenote.json).

Now you can go to the Simplenote website and import the newly created json file.

Notes and Caveats

There are some issues that you should be aware of when importing your notes.

• There is already an Evernote importer on the Simplenote website, why did you write this? A: The current enex importer is very badly broken and duplicates your notes over and over. It is not recommended.

• This does not handle any attachments since simplenote doesn’t support them. This script does not ignore the note that has attachments. This may make for some strange notes being imported with little to no text.

• Evernote’s export looks like those horrific Microsoft Word html exports. You may want to cleanse the content data a bit before running the script. This is left as an exercise for the user.

• The notes in Evernote randomly contain unicode characters that aren’t really harmful to you today, but may bite you in the rear later. This script just passes the buck, no extra cleansing of the text is done. The oddest character is a unicode space, why on earth do we need unicode spaces in our notes?1?!

Links

PyPi

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ever2simple

Github

http://github.com/claytron/ever2simple

Bug Reports

http://github.com/claytron/ever2simple/issues

TODO

• Write some basic tests

• Finish out the command line options - Output file - stdout option - csv output

• Unicode for DictWriter

• Test on Python 3

Changes

1.1 (2015-03-25)

• Forgot to write change log entries. [claytron]

1.0 (2015-03-25)

• Fix issue with HTML2Text import. [claytron]

• Fix issue with xmlSAX2Characters: huge text node error. [claytron]

• Bump version to avoid having to use pip install --pre. [claytron]

1.0a3 (2011-10-11)

• Pin python-dateutil to less than 2.0 so that the Python 3 only version isn’t pulled down. [claytron]

1.0a1 (2011-06-14)

• Initial release