I ran against a recent note with this in it:

Or just "Actions ⚙️ "

And got back:

Actions ⚙️

Pasting that into https://ftfy.vercel.app/?s=Actions+%E2%80%9A%C3%B6%C3%B4%C3%94%E2%88%8F%C3%A8+ gives this:

python s = 'Actions â\x80\x9aöôÃ\x94â\x88\x8fè' s = s.encode('latin-1') s = s.decode('utf-8') s = s.encode('macroman') s = s.decode('utf-8') print(s)

______________________________________________________ ERROR collecting tests/test_apple_notes_to_sqlite.py _______________________________________________________ ImportError while importing test module '/Users/lol/development/apple-notes-to-sqlite/tests/test_apple_notes_to_sqlite.py'. Hint: make sure your test modules/packages have valid Python names. Traceback: /opt/homebrew/Cellar/python@3.9/3.9.16/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.9/lib/python3.9/importlib/__init__.py:127: in import_module return _bootstrap._gcd_import(name[level:], package, level) tests/test_apple_notes_to_sqlite.py:2: in <module> from apple_notes_to_sqlite.cli import cli, COUNT_SCRIPT, FOLDERS_SCRIPT E ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'apple_notes_to_sqlite'

Solution: This is likely a PYTHONPATH issue due to having pytest installed both globally and in the venv. We can guarantee the tests run by adding the current directory to sys.path automatically using

python -m pytest

The alternative is to activate the venv, install pytest, deactivate, then activate the venv again (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/35045038/how-do-i-use-pytest-with-virtualenv)

Neat project! You can probably increase performance using my python interface to Notes, macnotesapp, which uses Scripting Bridge and bulk queries for much better performance than AppleScript.

Another related project is PyXA which uses Scripting Bridge to access Notes (and many other apps) and can return all the notes at once as opposed to calling AppleScript for each note.

macnotesapp allows you to access multiple accounts and folders as well.

```python from macnotesapp import NotesApp

NotesApp() provides interface to Notes.app

notesapp = NotesApp()

Get list of notes (Note objects for each note)

notes = notesapp.notes() note = notes[0] print( note.id, note.account, note.folder, note.name, note.body, note.plaintext, note.password_protected, )

print(note.asdict())

```

Working with nested data in SQL is tricky, can I make it easier with a view or canned query?

Notes can live in folders. These relationships should be exported too.

As seen in other tools like https://github.com/simonw/git-history

The full body version of the notes can get HUGE, due to embedded images. It turns out for my own purposes I'm usually happy with just the plaintext version.

I'm tempted to say you don't get HTML unless you pass a --html option.

Running this script can take several hours against a large notes database.

Would be neat if it could run against just the notes that have been modified since it last ran. Could pull the max updated date and then keep on looping until it finds one modified before then.

Problem is I don't actually know what order it iterates over the notes in.

FTS would be useful.

Maybe even extract the plain text from the notes to make that index easier to create, rather than creating it against the HTML. Can use the plaintext property for that.

It's going to shell out to osascript as seen in: - #1

I'm going with that option because https://appscript.sourceforge.io/status.html warns against the other potential methods:

Apple eliminated its Mac Automation department in 2016. The future of AppleScript and its related technologies is unclear. Caveat emptor.

But osascript looks pretty stable to me.

Option that doesn't write to the database at all, it just outputs all the notes to stdout as newline-delimited JSON.

I'm using ChatGPT to figure out enough AppleScript to get at my notes data.