First working version

[simonw]

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

• Initial proof of concept with ChatGPT #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.

[simonw]

I think the AppleScript I want to pass to osascript looks like this:

tell application "Notes"
   repeat with eachNote in every note
      set noteId to the id of eachNote
      set noteTitle to the name of eachNote
      set noteBody to the body of eachNote
      log "------------------------" & "\n"
      log noteId & "\n"
      log noteTitle & "\n\n"
      log noteBody & "\n"
   end repeat
end tell

But there are a few more properties I'd like to get - created and updated date for example.

[simonw]

I opened the "Script Editor" app on my computer, used Window -> Library to open the Library panel, then clicked on the Notes app there. I got this:

So the notes object has these properties:

• name (text) : the name of the note (normally the first line of the body)
• id (text, r/o) : the unique identifier of the note
• container (folder, r/o) : the folder of the note
• body (text) : the HTML content of the note
• plaintext (text, r/o) : the plaintext content of the note
• creation date (date, r/o) : the creation date of the note
• modification date (date, r/o) : the modification date of the note
• password protected (boolean, r/o) : Is the note password protected?
• shared (boolean, r/o) : Is the note shared?

I'm going to ignore the concept of attachments for the moment.

[simonw]

My prototype showed that images embedded in notes come out in the HTML export as bas64 image URLs, which is neat.

[simonw]

Converting AppleScript date strings to ISO format is hard!

https://forum.latenightsw.com/t/formatting-dates/841 has a recipe I'll try:

set todayISO to (todayDate as «class isot» as string)

Not clear to me how timezones work here. I'm going to ignore them for the moment.

[simonw]

Before that conversion:

Monday, March 6, 2023 at 11:55:15 AM

After:

2023-03-06T11:55:15

[simonw]

It doesn't have tests yet. I guess I'll need to mock subprocess to test this.

[simonw]

OK, this works!