That last limitation-the lack of unique IDs-is a huge pain. Notes in the export don’t have any form of unique ID!.They don’t include a hash, but I figured out that decoding the base64 string and then running it through MD5 generates the hash that is used in the corresponding tag. Those inline images are CDATA encoded base64 strings.The notes XML format is mostly XHTML, but includes custom tags where inline images should be displayed.

This means you have to run a nested XML parser for every note you process.

Some of the data in the file-the note content itself for example-consists of further blocks of XML embedded in CDATA.

It’s possible to work around this by manually exporting the notes from each notebook one at a time and storing them in separate export files. So I can’t tell which recipes were in my “cooking” notebook.

Notebooks are not represented in the file at all-you just get the notes.

I ran into some significant limitations while working with my ENEX export. (I thought I’d need to tweak the script for performance since it works by loading the entire file into memory, but my laptop has 32GB of RAM so it didn’t even blink.) ENEX limitations This shows me that every note is represented as a element, and crucial metadata lives in children of a child element. Here’s a subset of the output when run against my Notes.enex file ( full output is here).

in 2009 I wrote a Python script for this-as part of this project I updated it for Python 3 and pushed a release to PyPI. When faced with unknown XML like this it’s useful to get a high level overview of what tags are present. These files can get BIG, because any images attached to your notes will be embedded as base64 encoded binary data within the XML. Select a note-or multiple notes-in the Evernote macOS desktop app, use the File -> Export Notes menu item and Evernote will create a Notes.enex exported XML file. Last weekend I decided to try using their “Export notes” feature instead, and its ENEX XML format. Unfortunately the API is implemented using Thrift (the only public API I’ve seen to use that) and my attempts to speak to it from Python have so far failed to get anywhere. Ideally I’d use their API for that, so I could continually export new notes via a cron. I’ve been using Evernote for over a decade, and I’ve long wanted to export my data from it so I can do interesting things with it.

Export evernote notes