Google Keep notes to Simplenote conversion script

  • Unknown's avatar
    ffr31 · Member ·

    Hiya, just thought I’d share this here in case it’s useful to anyone else.

    I wrote a small Python script that takes a Google Keep notes export archive and converts it to a Simplenote-compatible JSON file which you can then import using the web UI. It worked quite well on my own set of notes. Hope it helps someone else.

    https://gist.github.com/echus/ce7cd43ec18edaad8105ca37349af41b

  • staff-fred · Staff ·

    Thank you for sharing! We appreciate it!

  • Unknown's avatar
    recaru92 · Member ·

    HI! I just decided I want to switch to simplenote from keep. I have a million notes and switching them over one by one would take more time than I have right now. I found your handy script but I don’t know anything about python/coding/scripts. I am doing this on android as I am traveling in Peru and have no computer. I got pydroid 3 and I have my Google Keep takeout file (.zip, the other file option was .tzc or some such that I don’t recognize) and I managed to run the script in pydroid. But the program completed and said that it processed 0 notes. I assume this is because I never pointed it to my takeout.zip. can someone give me a tip on how to run this script in this context or would I actually need to take time to familiarize my self with python, ie. Abandon this project for now?

    thanks for any help you can give!

  • Unknown's avatar
    recaru92 · Member ·

    Just to clarify my above post, what I would like to know is how to point to the script at my takeout file. I copied the location on my phone and pasted it into the KEEP_PATH = “(copiedmyfilelocationhereincludingzipextension.zip)./Keep” line but I got the same result and thats about the end of my intuition here.

  • Unknown's avatar
    ffr31 · Member ·

    Hey @recaru92, you need to extract the files from the zip archive somewhere first.

    Then when they’re extracted, set KEEP_PATH to the location of the folder containing the extracted files, i.e.:

    KEEP_PATH = “/extracted/folder”

  • Unknown's avatar
    talentedusually6311230c9d · Member ·

    Thanks for the script. I ran into an encoding issue, as I’m running this on a non US english computer so python did not default to UTF-8, which is the encoding used in the takeout files.

    I first got the error message

    File "d:Usersldugoi_xPortableAppspythonkeep_to_simplenote.py", line 38

e 39, in

keep = json.load(f)

File "json__init__.py", line 293, in load

File "encodingscp1252.py", line 23, in decode

UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x8d in position 12

1843: character maps to <undefined>

    The fix is

    add 

    import io

    at the top of the file

    And on line 38 (which may have moved to line 39 with the above insertion),

    replace

     with open(filename, "r") as f:

    with

     with io.open(filename,mode="r",encoding="utf-8") as f:

    and viola.

  • Unknown's avatar
    synapsecracklepop · Member ·

    Thanks so much for creating this! Just used it to import 150 notes. Even starting from a relatively severe deficit (I thought I had python installed, but I guess that was my old laptop?), I still got everything done in about 15 minutes.

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