Workflowy now supports exporting to OPML

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jun 5, 2013 at 04:44 PM

Dr Andus wrote:
In the meantime I’ve also come across Joe Pairman’s online Workflowy
>OPML converter (which I’m too scared to try, as my Workflowy data is all
>very personal stuff):

Not to contradict you, but I am surprised that you use Workflowy in the first place if you fear about such data…

>He also provides a Python script, which can be run offline
>(unfortunately I don’t know enough Python to be able to run it).

1. Download the Python installer for your system here: http://www.python.org/download/
2. Run the installer; select “Add python.exe to path” to make your life easier afterwards
3. Unzip Joepairmans script to a folder of your choice (make it easy to visit via the command prompt)
4. Open a command window and navigate to the script folder
5. Type “parse_outline.py -h” (without quotes) at the command prompt to get help on using the script

To make things easier still, you can the copy workflowy export file to the same directory so that you don’t need to type paths.

>However, he says the following about inline note text:
> >“Note text becomes the value for the _note attribute; a non-standard but
>common usage, supported by Omni Outliner, CarbonFin Outliner, and Tree.
>(Fargo can display attributes, including note attributes, in the
>sidebar.)”
> >So if I understand correctly, putting the Workflowy OPML file through
>CarbonFin might actually assign this “_note attribute” which
>subsequently might become readable in Bonsai?

This is my understanding too.

>What I don’t get is why the Bonsai filter that is provided by CarbonFin
>doesn’t do the same as the online CarbonFin conversion.

The online converter may be more recent and different in many ways.

>I even
>discovered that my CarbonFin OMPL filter was an older version
>(01/02/2009), so I replaced it with the latest version (17/11/2009). The
>only difference between the two is that the older one had
>encoding=“ISO-8859-1”, while the new one has encoding=“UTF-8” (not sure
>what the difference is).

Very big difference: ISO-8859-1 is the specific “latin 1” character set of 8-bit ASCII encoding. UTF-8 is backwards compatible with this but is much much broader, including all languages covered by Unicode. More here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8

So a UTF-8 capable system can read ISO-8859-1, but not the other way around.

>However, this did not fix either the accented
>character problem or the inline notes when importing the Workflowy OPML
>file directly into Bonsai.

My impression is that Bonsai is rather old to be UTF-8 compatible (and therefore handle accented characters not covered by ISO-8859-1).