alexwennerberg/boxnotes2html

Export/convert Box Notes to HTML, Markdown or Plain Text.

boxnotes2html

boxnotes2html is a tool to convert Box Notes to html, markdown or plain text

NOTE: Due to changes in the Box Note format, this only works with Box Notes created before August 2022. See this issue

Also note: This is a script I wrote several years ago. I do not use it actively. You are happy to use it, and I appreciate emails and can answer questions, but I am unlikely to field feature requests for free

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If you or your institution got value out of this script, please consider making a donation! I created and maintain this script for free in my free time.

Rationale

Box Notes are a proprietary, undocumented format, which makes them difficult to export or move to another service. According to this support ticket the official way in which they meet GDPR compliance is through allowing users to print the notes page as a PDF when it's open in a web browser. Another option is to Copy/paste the document into LibreOffice, Google Docs, Microsoft Word or some other text-editing program. Neither of these are very attractive options when exporting a large number of Box Notes, say, for archival/backup purposes or in the process of migrating to another platform.

Installation

No external dependencies required! Just the good old Python standard library.

Use pip install boxnotes2html to install.

To install from source:

git clone https://github.com/alexwennerberg/boxnotes2html
pip install .

Requires Python 3. Tested on >=3.5

Usage

boxnotes2html -h for help and options.

To convert a file:

boxnotes2html mynote.boxnote

Will create a file called mynote. You can optionally specify the filetype with -f, current options, in order to most to least reliable, html, md (markdown), and txt (plaintext)

You can specify one or more options. If any of the options are a directory, boxnotes2html will convert those notes and put the new file next to it in the directory path.

Box doesn't allow for you to download individual Box notes from the UI, but you can put them into a folder and download that folder, or use the API.

You can also use boxnotes2html as an imported library:

from boxnotes2html import BoxNote

# From string
note = BoxNote("boxnote_file_content_string")
# Or from file
note = BoxNote.from_file("filename.boxnote")

note.as_html() # returns an html string
note.as_markdown() # returns a markdown string
note.as_text() # returns raw text

The HTML formatted by this tool is pretty ugly -- that may not be important for a lot of cases, but you may want to use tidy or another tool to clean it up. You can also use pandoc to convert from html to another format, such as PDFs, markdown, microsoft word, and so on. I haven't tested all these tools, so I can't vouch for their effectiveness.

Functioning:

• Text formatting (bold, underline, colors, size, etc)
• Hyperlinks
• Ordered, unordered, checked and unchecked lists are supported in Markdown (using Github flavoured check/uncheck syntax).
• Tables in Markdown

Caveats:

• HTML lists don't supported nesting
• HTML tables are broken however it should be possible to take the approach used for Markdown and apply it - PRs welcome.
• Images are just a link to the image in Box, converting them would require API access.
• Comments and annotations are not saved.
• Document history is not preserved
• This tool is in ALPHA, bugs may exist. Please report any issues you encounter!
• Links to other Box notes are not changed in any way

If this tool is unsatisfactory to your needs, please contact Box and tell them to build this much-needed feature!

Feedback

Feel free to open an issue or email me with any questions or feedback: [email protected] If you use this library, I would love to know what your experience is, positive or negative. I do maintain this, so feel free to make feature requests or bug reports. Thanks, and enjoy!