[Evernote] Internal Evernote note links are not converted to Obsidian Links

[AltoRetrato]

After importing from Evernote into Obsidian, links for notes point to evernote:///view/[...] instead of being converted to Obsidian links.

In my case, a quick search in Obsidian for "evernote:///view/" showed 1.277 results...

Obsidian 1.6.7, Yarle 6.15.1, Windows 11.

[akosbalasko]

Hi @AltoRetrato ,
Could you pls share the config that you used? And the version of Evernote you use for export. Thanks a lot!

[AltoRetrato]

Evernote 10.107.3-win-ddl-public (20240924143738) - Editor: v179.3.0 - Service: v2.11.0

Yarle config (renamed to JSON to be able to upload it here):
yarle_20241003_185804.config.json

Thanks!

[akosbalasko]

@AltoRetrato ,
And the log itself about the execution pls.
thank you!

[AltoRetrato]

I did not save the log after the first conversion and couldn't find it saved anywhere, so I converted everything again using all default configuration values. Since I used the defaults (which include "keepEvernoteLinkIfNoNoteFound": false), there are no more evernote:///view/[...] links. However, I still have incorrect internal links that point to non-existing notes.

It seems the main issue is that, in Evernote, the note links (e.g., <a href="evernote:///view/aaaaaaa/bbb/cccccccc-cccc-cccc-cccc-cccccccccccc/dddddddd-dddd-dddd-dddd-dddddddddddd/">Evernote alternatives</a>) use a note ID that is not included in the note attributes within the exported .enex files. Therefore, any program relying solely on the data in the .enex files can only "guess" which note to link to based on the text inside the anchor tag, which is not necessarily the actual name of the note it points to. When the link text matches the note name, the link works correctly; otherwise, it either points to a wrong note or to a non-existing one.

The only real solutions to this issue I can think of seem to be:

• Having Evernote modify its software to include note IDs in the .enex files, and addressing other issues as well, such as exporting the correct note titles instead of defaulting to "Untitled Note" (I have 46 such cases in my .enex files, even though they are correctly named in the program).
• Using the Evernote API instead of .enex files to convert the data to Markdown.
• Reading data directly from the Evernote local databases

EDIT: a quick Python script to analyze the vault produced:

Results
  Scanned notes         : 2,965
  Empty notes           : 0
  Internal links        : 7,827
  Invalid internal links: 1,009

[akosbalasko]

Hi @AltoRetrato ,
Thanks for the details and insights, yeah, your conclusion is 100% correct. I checked 2/3 of the proposed solutions months and years ago, but unfortunately non of them can be achieved:
"Having Evernote modify its software" - it's a closed company, feature request can be raised (as far as I remember I did it so, years ago), but there is no quarantee that anything will happen anytime.
"API" - it's closed for newcomers too, I cannot have access to Evernote via API.

"Reading data" - that's a good point, I try to check it out soon.
Thank you!

[AltoRetrato]

https://github.com/vzhd1701/evernote-backup uses the Evernote API to do a full local backup of notes and notebooks in a SQLite DB, including the guid of each note and notebook. I'll later write a script to export from that DB to Markdown.

A kind of hack-ish alternative would be to use the Evernote web API to get the same data.

[AltoRetrato]

FWIW, I requested API access and receive my key in about 48 hours.

[bumper314]

@AltoRetrato You are correct that the note ID is not included in the ENEX export, which is why, for each notebook, you must create a note titled "Table of Contents" with a note link to every note in that notebook. This was documented somewhere in this codebase at one time, but I can't seem to find it now.

It's also very difficult to create this ToC note in Evernote 10 because you can only select 50 (or maybe 100) notes at a time to copy their note links. Further, Evernote recently changed their internal note link format, and YARLE doesn't yet support it. See #655.

Also, I can confirm that note links are not getting replaced correctly, even with the Table of Contents notes. I'm digging into the issue, which revolves around bad logic in the keepEvernoteLinkIfNoNoteFound setting, which has greedy regexes which are replacing way too much if there's more than one link in a line, but I don't think that's the only problem.