content/til/migrating-my-markdown-notes-from-obsidian-to-apple-notes.md

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+title =  "Migrating my markdown notes from Obsidian to Apple Notes"
+date =  2024-03-03
+
+[taxonomies]
+tags = ["markdown", "obsidian", "apple", "pandoc", "bash"]
+categories = [ "TIL" ]
+
+[extra]
+toc = true
+keywords = ["markdown", "html", "pandoc", "obsidian", "apple notes", "bash", "migrate"]
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+
+So I wanted to migrate my markdown notes from Obsidian to Apple Notes. Apple Notes did not support import from markdown. I also wanted to maintain the folder structure. 
+
+For every file I also wanted to maintain the title of the note. I wanted to prepend the title to the HTML file so that when I import the HTML file to Apple Notes, the title is correctly set. I did this by adding the file name (without the extension) as an `h1` tag to the HTML file.
+
+I did this using [pandoc](https://pandoc.org) and a bash script. Here is how I did it:
+
+```bash
+#!/bin/bash
+
+SRC_DIR="/obsidian_notes"
+DEST_DIR="/notes_migrated_to_html"
+
+find "$SRC_DIR" -type f -name "*.md" | while IFS= read -r file; do
+    # Compute the subdirectory path
+    sub_dir="$(dirname "${file#$SRC_DIR/}")"
+    # Compute the destination path
+    dest_path="$DEST_DIR/$sub_dir"
+    # Print the source and destination paths for logging purposes
+    echo "processing: [$file] to [$dest_path]"
+    # Create the destination directory structure
+    mkdir -p "$dest_path"
+    # Define the output HTML file path
+    output_html="${dest_path}/$(basename "${file%.md}.html")"
+    # Convert the Markdown file to HTML
+    pandoc "$file" -o "$output_html"
+    # Extract the base filename without the extension for the title
+    base_name="$(basename "$file" .md)"
+    # Prepend the title to the HTML file
+    echo "<h1>$base_name</h1>$(cat "$output_html")" > "$output_html"
+done
+```
+
+I put the above script in a file called `convert_md_to_html.sh` and made it executable using `chmod +x convert_md_to_html.sh`. Then I ran the script using `./convert_md_to_html.sh`. This script will convert all the markdown files in the `SRC_DIR` to HTML files and put them in the `DEST_DIR` while maintaining the folder structure. Then I imported the HTML files to Apple Notes using the `File -> Import to Notes` option. This worked like a charm. I was able to maintain the folder structure and the notes were imported with the correct titles.