Hi, I’ve got a very large note in Joplin that is a research repository of information captured from many sources – web, journals etc. The note is structured as a numbered list.
I’m excited to discover Obsidian and would like to import this repo into it but when I export the note as a .md file it shows up as a single note in Obsidian.
Is there any smart (ie other than manual) way to decompose the Joplin list into individual markdown notes so that I can import into Obsidian?
I’d like to create visual graph of all the information in the note via Obsidian vs the current Joplin list which is becoming unwieldy and has poor search – if that is a resonable objective with the app?
How is the Joplin note structured exactly? Are there any unique combinations of characters at the cusp of each potential Obsidian note you can use in a find and replace action to split them via an automation?
It’s just a numbered list with hundred of items – each a sentence/paragraph captured from an external source and with a url/doi referencing the source.
Experimenting on a smaller note in my archive, also a list, I found that I can change the list to a bulleted list which generates the unique ‘•’ character before each item. Could that be useful?
Sure, that could be helpful. What OS are you on? The next step is identifying an automation utility that can recognize those characters and use it to split the file.
The resulting files will be named “Note 1”, “Note 2”, etc., but it should be trivial for you to edit that to insert a different phrase than “Note" if desired.
You’ll have to open it yourself and insert the appropriate delimiter on line three (e.g., at the end of set theItems to my splitText(theText, "- “)).
I should have mentioned that the list also contains a number of images. I’m guessing that the script is for text files, because it doesn’t accept .md or docx files.
My steps so far are to
Export the Joplin note as an .md file with associated resources folder containing images
Use Pandoc to convert to docx and replace the numbered list with a bulleted list using a special character
The challenge is that the docx is >400 pages. If I import the docx back into md, the bullets are replaced by ‘–’.
Is there an automated solution to split the docx or .md file into multiple notes that Obsidian can import?
Getting this error on running the script on an .md file on the desktop:
error “Finder got an error: Can’t make file (alias “path:to:file:yes.md”) into type file.” number -1700 from file (alias “path:to:file:yes.md”) to file
At least manual sifting gets you to reacquaint yourself with the notes. I went through something similar recently in converting my previous system to Obsidian and cleaned up a lot of kipple.