Workflowy now supports exporting to OPML

Posted by Joe Pairman
Jun 6, 2013 at 02:43 PM

Hi Dr Andus and all,

Nice to find this forum, and I’m happy that my outline2outline page provided some helpful clues to the inline notes at least. A few thoughts that might clarify further:

I’ve had a quick look at the exported OPML from Workflowy. The main difference from the OPML my script produced was that I used an attribute name of “_note” for the notes, whereas the Workflowy export doesn’t have the underscore; the attribute name is just “note”. (It seemed to me that _note was the more common usage, though as the OPML standard doesn’t cover notes, it’s pretty much up to each app’s implementation!) So if you’re having trouble viewing notes in the Workflowy export file, for example if you open it in Tree, you could just do a find/replace over your OPML file. A quick and dirty way would be to replace:
note=”
with:
_note=”
A more robust way would be a regex or, to be absolutely sure, an XSL transform!

Regarding the safety of data, indeed, my online tool is inherently insecure as it uses an non-encrypted connection. I looked into the possibility of doing it over HTTPS, but it was too expensive for a hobby project. So that’s why I posted the warnings about data security, and I’m glad they were effective. Workflowy uses HTTPS so is more secure in terms of the possibility of data being intercepted.

Regarding the script not working, it does require Python 2.7 or greater (but not Python 3.x). Perhaps that’s what the problem was? I’d have liked to do it for Python 3 but I wanted to keep the code the same as for the online tool on Google App Engine, which doesn’t support 3.x yet.

Hope that’s helpful.

Cheers,
Joe