Export Day One journal entries into html, text, or another format using a Jinja template.

by Nathan Grigg

• jinja2 for templating
• pytz for time zone support.
• markdown (optional) to convert entries to html.

If you have pip installed, you can run

pip install jinja2 pytz markdown

and you are ready to go.

After you have installed the dependencies and downloaded the script, cd into the dayone_export directory and run

./dayone_export.py ~/Dropbox/Apps/"Day One"/Journal.dayone

Adjust the argument to be the path to your Day One journal.

usage: dayone_export.py [-h] [--template FILE] [--output FILE]
                        [--timezone ZONE] [--reverse] journal

Export Day One entries using a Jinja template

positional arguments:
  journal          path to Day One journal package

optional arguments:
  -h, --help       show this help message and exit
  --template FILE  template file
  --output FILE    output file
  --timezone ZONE  time zone name. Use --timezone "?" for more info
  --reverse        Display in reverse chronological order

Photos are not copied from the Day One package. If it has photos you will
need to copy the "photos" folder from inside the Day One package into the
same directory as the output file.

Journal Entries
===============
{% for entry in journal %}
Date: {{ entry['Date'].strftime('%A, %b %e, %Y') }}

{{ entry['Text'] }}

{% endfor %}

Templates receive a single variable: journal, which is a list of entries. So your template will probably look something like this:

... document header, title, etc ...
{% for entry in journal %}
... code for a single entry ...
{% endfor %}
... end of document stuff, etc ...

Each entry has the following keys:

• Date
• Text
• Starred
• UUID
• Photo (the path of the corresponding photo, if it exists)
• Place Name (e.g. Boom Noodle)
• Locality (e.g. Seattle)
• Administrative Area (e.g. Washington)
• Country (e.g. United States)
• Longitude
• Latitude
• Fahrenheit
• Celsius
• Description (this refers to the weather)
• IconName (also refers to weather)

You insert one of these into your document using double brackets, e.g.

{{ entry['Place Name'] }}

Jinja will just leave a blank space if you try to access a nonexistent key. If you want to test if a key exists, you can always do

{% if Longitude in entry %}
... conditional code
{% endif %}

Each entry also has a place convenience function. You can use entry.place() or entry.place(4) to get a comma-separated list of all the places in order. If you use entry.place(3), it will only show the first three levels and leave off the country. Or entry.place(1,4) will leave off the "Place Name" and just show city, state, country. You can get more complicated; for details, see the code.

You can call Python's strftime on the date to format it. For example:

{{ entry['Date'].strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S %z') }}

If you have python markdown installed, you can pass things through the markdown filter using a pipe:

{{ entry['Text'] | markdown }}

This converts the text to html.

For more details on Jinja templates, see the Jinja template designer documentation.