Convert Dynalist flavored OPML to Org Mode

opmlconv.py

#!/usr/bin/env python
import bs4


def convert_element(lines, level=1):
    result = ''
    for line in lines:
        if not isinstance(line, bs4.element.Tag) or \
           line.name != 'outline':
            continue
        result += '*' * level + ' ' + line.attrs.get('text', '') + '\n'
        if 'note' in line.attrs:
            result += line.attrs['note'].replace('\r', '\n') + '\n'
        result += convert_element(line.children, level + 1)
    return result


def convert_file(path):
    root = bs4.BeautifulSoup(open(path), "lxml")
    return convert_element(root.select('html body opml')[0])

def main():
    import sys
    output_path = sys.argv[1][:-4] + 'org'
    result = convert_file(sys.argv[1])
    open(output_path, 'w').write(result)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

I know this is a bit old but the 'note' key is actually '_note' now. Thanks for this!

I have extended this script to convert inline Markdown formating (links, bold text, and so on) to Org Mode format.

The conversion is done by pandoc via pypandoc (which you both have to install, see here).

Warning: This script is extremely slow and takes ages to finish if you have a decent amount of content in your Dynalist files.

The reason is, that pypandoc spawns a new process for every invocation (i.e. it's not a binding via a C-API or so), and we have to call pypandoc for every headline and for every note (I tried several approaches to prevent this, but it wasn't possible easily).

I have used the following command with GNU parallel to run several instances of the script in parallel:

find . -name "*.opml" | parallel --bar --eta python convert.py {}

I'm using Linux, so I don't know if these dependencies are available on MacOS or Windows.

Here is the altered script:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import bs4
import pypandoc

def convert_element(lines, level=1):
    result = ''
    for line in lines:
        if not isinstance(line, bs4.element.Tag) or \
           line.name != 'outline':
            continue
        result += '*' * level + ' ' + md_to_org(line.attrs.get('text', '')) + '\n'
        if '_note' in line.attrs:
            result += md_to_org(line.attrs['_note'].replace('\r', '\n')) + '\n'
        result += convert_element(line.children, level + 1)
    return result

def md_to_org(md):
    return pypandoc.convert_text(md, "org", format="md")

def convert_file(path):
    content = open(path, "r").read()
    root = bs4.BeautifulSoup(content, "lxml")
    return convert_element(root.select('html body opml')[0])

def main():
    import sys
    print("Converting " + sys.argv[1])
    output_path = sys.argv[1][:-4] + 'org'
    result = convert_file(sys.argv[1])
    result = result.replace("\n\n*", "\n*")
    open(output_path, 'w').write(result)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()