Convert HTML back to Markdown

Actions - Help & Questions
1

Drafts is very good at displaying and converting Markdown to HTML. Is there a way I could create a note containing simple HTML and get Drafts to convert it to Markdown?

My use case: I keep my calendar in Google. If I put any notes in the Description field that might be considered RTF, e.g. a hyperlink, Google automatically converts the entire Description to basic HTML. If I can convert that back to Markdown it will be human readable again.

Thank you.

2

Not sure how easy it would be to integrate. I’m aware of the Turndown project that is a pure Javascript HTML > Markdown conversion library which, in theory, could be used in an action if any one is up for trying.

3

I’ve been using the html2text Python script in Pythonista. I use a Workflow to grab web pages, etc. to bring them into Drafts as Markdown.

If it’s very simple HTML, you could just write your own script to do the replacements.

4

Nick, I have Pythonista but have never used it. May I see your Workflow and attempt to duplicate your solution? Thank you.

5

Sure, I’m happy to share what I have. Here’s a screenshot of the Workflow – I’m pretty new to using the app and I’m not sure if there’s a way to share that isn’t public like we can do on the action directory.

image
image1325×750 118 KB

Here’s a simple script I created to demonstrate how easy it is.

import html2text
import urllib
import sys
import webbrowser
"""
Simple Web Scraper using html2text
https://github.com/Alir3z4/html2text

Many parameters can be adjusted as needed

Example usage:
pythonista3://webscrape.py?action=run&argv=LINK_GOES_HERE
(or use "Run Script" option in Workflow)
"""
# Read passed-in url and get html
url = sys.argv[1]
with urllib.request.urlopen(url) as response:
  html = response.read().decode('utf-8')

# Set html2text options and get text
h = html2text.HTML2Text()
h.body_width = 0            # Don't wrap text
h.inline_links = False      # Reference-style MD links

md = h.handle(html)

if md:
  mdEscaped = urllib.parse.quote(md)
  xurl = 'drafts5://x-callback-url/create?text=' + mdEscaped
  webbrowser.open(xurl)

Pythonista comes with a version of html2text included, so you can see if this does what you want out of the box. I actually downloaded the current version of the module into site-packages, but I’m not sure how much of a difference there is. I had a specific project for which I needed HTML to Markdown conversion, so I had to make some tweaks.

If you don’t want to pull from a url, you could easily modify the script to accept the HTML directly. I hope this helps!

Nick

2 Likes
6

Nick, thank you. I will dig in as soon as I can. Take care. Craig

7

The easiest way to deal with this is probably the workflow app. It has a rich text to markdown action I use for this sort of thing all the time.

8

Yes I forgot about the Workflow Rich Text to Markdown action. It works for some things, but for my needs, I found html2text to be more customizable. Plus, in Pythonista, I have access to the HTML before and after conversion. I’m sure some of that could be done in Workflow but I’m not very experienced with it.

I love Pythonista though! Along with Drafts it’s one of my most-used apps these days.