How do I import a Day One journal into orgmode?

Question

I have been using Day One for a while but I dislike it being Mac only. I have a capture template in orgmode that creates new journal entries in a tree.

Example:

*2015

**2015-11 November.

***2015-11-2 Monday

**** My journal entry.

Day One can export to markdown. The format is like this:

Date: June 2, 2010 at 11:11 PM Location: My location, City, Country Weather: 45° Clear

Text entry.

What would be the best way to I import this into my orgmode journal?

Answer 1

I ended up doing this because dayone exports with tabs:

\t\Date:\t

Replace with:

***

Then creating years and moving stuff manually. Titles don't have the same exact format that orgmode journal creates but who cares.

Answer 2

You can do this quickly with regex search & replace, M-C %. Replace ^Date: with *** to create your headlines, and repeat for other elements as necessary. Since you'll only likely do this once, a few rounds of search & replace is probably going to be faster than writing code.

Answer 3

My elisp is too bad to make the converter inside emacs, but I whipped up a Ruby script to do it for you.

Converts a Day One plain text export (Journal.txt) into org-mode journal format. It does ...

• Markdown image conversion from to [[thepath.jpg]]
• Extraction of images from the front of an entry; moves it right after the property drawer.
• Creation of nested year/month/day date sections (see example below)

That means you get a nested outline like this

* 2020
** 2020-03 March
*** 2020-03-14 Saturday
**** Here's a diary entry imported from Day One.
:PROPERTIES:
:CREATED: [2020-03-14 Sat 14:33]
:END_PROPERTIES:
**** And another one from the same day.
:PROPERTIES:
:CREATED: [2020-03-14 Sat 19:12]
:END_PROPERTIES:
** 2020-06 June
*** 2020-06-22 Monday
**** Year, month, and day sections are created automatically.
:PROPERTIES:
:CREATED: [2020-06-22 Mon 08:06]
:END_PROPERTIES:

Script source

See the public Gist or the following code: https://gist.github.com/DivineDominion/f7be383776bef5a57a4a812fabc4e8b7

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
#
#  convert_dayone_to_org.rb
#  Copyright © 2020 Christian Tietze. All rights reserved. Distributed under the MIT License.
# 
#  TODOs:
#  - changing the image directory name during import using an option
#  - changing the hash-based image file names to date-time format
#
#  Usage:
#
#   ./convert_dayone_to_org.rb Journal.txt output.org

require "date"

input, output, *rest = ARGV
if input.nil?
  STDERR.puts "Usage: #{__FILE__} DAYONE_INPUT_PATH ORG_OUTPUT_PATH"
  STDERR.puts "Missing input file path"
  exit 1
elsif output.nil?
  STDERR.puts "Usage: #{__FILE__} DAYONE_INPUT_PATH ORG_OUTPUT_PATH"
  STDERR.puts "Missing output file path"
  exit 1
end

File.open(output, "w") do |out|
  # Cached values to make sub-headings
  year = nil
  month = nil
  day = nil
  props = {}
  File.readlines(input).each do |line|
    if /\A\t(?<key>\w+):\t(?<value>.*+)$/ =~ line
      # Collect metadata in `props` dictionary
      case key
      when "Date"
        date = DateTime.parse(value)
        props["Created"] = date.strftime("[%Y-%m-%d %a %H:%M]")
        # Convert date lines to new entries in org

        # Output:  "* 2020"
        if year != date.year
          out.puts "* #{date.year}"
          year = date.year
          month = nil
        end

        # Output:  "** 2020-03 March"
        if month != date.month
          out.puts "** #{date.strftime("%Y-%m %B")}"
          month = date.month
        end

        # Output:  "*** 2020-03-12 Thursday"
        this_day = date.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %A")
        if day != this_day
          out.puts "*** #{this_day}"
        end
      else
        props[key] = value
      end
    elsif !props.empty?
      # Produce entry title and metadata
      if line.strip.empty?
        # Skip empty line separator after metadata
      else
        # Add entry heading, handling leading entry images
        cached_image = nil
        if /\A!\[]\((?<path>.+)\)(?<rest>.*)$/ =~ line
          cached_image = "[[./#{path}]]"
          out.puts "**** #{rest}"
        else
          out.puts "**** #{line}"
        end

        # Append property drawer
        out.puts ":PROPERTIES:"
        out.puts(props.map { |key, value| ":" + key.upcase.to_s + ":  " + value.to_s }
                      .join("\n"))
        out.puts ":END_PROPERTIES:"
        props = {}

        if !cached_image.nil?
          out.puts ""
          out.puts cached_image
        end
      end
    else
      line = line.gsub(/!\[\]\((.+)\)/) { "[[./#{$1}]]" }
      out.puts line
    end
  end
end

(Also posted more details on my blog for this https://christiantietze.de/posts/2020/10/export-day-one-journal-to-org-mode/)