(Archived) Bungled tags on 3000 notes...... Is there still hope ?

[ondam2000 0]

As the title suggests, I have screwed up my tagging, by not including commas between tags thus creating unique, long and meaningless tags....

I haven't really used tags to search documents, obviously, but now discover their worth and was wondering if there would be a way, just to automatically add commas in between words in my current tags to be able to exploit them properly....

[TheGurkha 1]

How about this un-proven theoretical way of doing it:

If you highlight all of your notes, go to File, Export you can export all of your notes.

There is a check-box option to include tags or not. If you export without tags the tags won't be included.

Delete all of your notes. Do a synch so they are also deleted from the EN cloud.

Import from your export (File, Import) and then synch again to put them into the EN cloud.

Then go through and re-tag.

Before you do anything, backup your existing database first. Twice.

[ondam2000 0]

Hi,

Thanks a lot first for your (speedy) reply. It's worth a try.

Actually, reading your answer also made me realize that my problem would be resolved to a large extent if I could search, not by full tags, but by part of a tag, ie the tag contains "evernote" rather than the tag equals "evernote notetaking gtd must". Which is equivalent to the tag equals "*evernote*". But I know the use of two wildcards is not accepted. I don't really understand why searching in notes can be done on the basis of an incomplete word, and it is not the case for tags. Would there be a workaround ? This way, I wouldn't have to retag those 3000 notes...

[TheGurkha 1]

The export can be opened in a good text editor like a programmer's editor (I use UltraEdit).

That editor allows me to use regex-based search and replace and macros etc within it, so you could perhaps automate the process of re-tagging that way, and then do the re-import.

[dan7000 26]

Here's an alternative suggestion:

In the tag list, delete each of your long tags in turn.

As you delete a tag, it removes the tag from your notes.

Now you can go through and re-tag your notes.