Untitled Notes in ENEX Import

[cpatterson1 1]

I exported a notebook to ENEX format and then imported to another account. When importing lots of the notes (but not all) show 'Untitled Note'. All the notes from the source had titles. Anyone seen this?

[Shahrum 1]

I have this same issue! Coming here to see if you found a fix!

[crawfordpatterson 21]

Hi, in the end I used the legacy application on Windows where the import and export seems more robust.

[danmills7 38]

What's crazy, is that all these months later - July 2021 - the problem still persists. I have submitted a support ticket to see if there is a more formally support solution than to go back to an unsupported older client.

[boardtc 5]

With the current windows app I exported 2 notebooks from Evernote with all notes having a title.

One of the notebooks had 14 notes and the other 49, when imported the first notebook had 2 Untitled notes and the 2nd 1. I redid the export and import and the same happened for the same notes. I could not see a pattern as to why those particular notes have a problem - it's only the title that had an issue.

It sounds like no one had got to the bottom of this, is there an open bug somewhere?

[PinkElephant 6,756]

Very specific questions like that one should be placed with support. We as other users can speculate about, but not reproduce your observation. And we can't analyze an activity log file.

Personally I never had something similar on exporting.

[boardtc 5]

I don't pay for mine so looking at https://evernote.com/contact

it says "Evernote Personal, Professional, and Teams customers can also sign in and access additional support options"

otherwise the forums is it.

[PinkElephant 6,756]

Correct - support by staff on technical issues is a subscribers feature.

[boardtc 5]

Another reason to get out of dodge...

[Boot17 1,050]

19 hours ago, boardtc said:

One of the notebooks had 14 notes and the other 49, when imported the first notebook had 2 Untitled notes and the 2nd 1. I redid the export and import and the same happened for the same notes. I could not see a pattern as to why those particular notes have a problem - it's only the title that had an issue.

And just to confirm, you exported from Evernote v10 to ENEX and then reimported to a different Evernote v10 account?

Which OS and version 10 of Evernote are you using?

[boardtc 5]

Evernote 10.60.4 on Windows 10 22H2. I am not importing into Evernote but importing with 2 separate utilities both gave the same untitled notes. I just did a reexport from Evernote and the same results were obtained. So the fault is definitely with the enex export if you wish to file a bug to improve the product as I can't.

[Jon/t 792]

Open your enex file using 'open with' in notepad and do a quick search for Untitled... if it doesn't appear then its the import and not the export.

I just checked a couple of exported notebooks and couldn't find untitled.

[agsteele 2,574]

1 hour ago, boardtc said:

...if you wish to file a bug to improve the product as I can't.

Sorry I can't raise a ticket because I cannot reproduce the issue and I'm using the latest release.

[Boot17 1,050]

I just exported three notebooks as a test. They had 95, 50, and 27 notes. None of them had an 'Untitled' note title. I didn't try and reimport them into Evernote though (as OP was doing) but I did open the ENEX files with a text editor and search for 'Untitled' and found nothing. I also searched for "<note><title>" (with the appropriate tab and CR) to make sure the <title> element wasn't just missing and I found all 95, 50 and 27 of them.

Perhaps there is something not quite right about the export tool though and so an import -- whether back into Evernote or a different tool will -- will have issues, but I have not way of knowing.

OP first reported this issue almost 3 years ago. v10 has improved quite a bit since then. @danmills7 submitted a ticket for it 2 years ago (presumably for the exact same scenario as OP -- but did they also try and import back into Evernote or was it a different tool that could also have been at play). Maybe they could provide more detail, but looks like they haven't posted in the forum for over a year and they are no longer using Evernote so doubtful they are still on the forums.

Not a lot of activity with this issue that I've seen.

With the three notebooks that I tried, I couldn't seem to recreate the problem.

@boardtc, I think @Jon/t has a good idea -- to open your ENEX files in a text editor and see if you can find a note that is titled "Untitled" or is perhaps missing the "<title>" element in the export and see if you can narrow down the issue.

[Jon/t 792]

I think in an enex file images are stored in base64 so they are really long strings hence the 54000 lines.

The key would be to count the number of <title> tags to see if they match the number of notes in the export or see if any <title></title> selections are empty.

[boardtc 5]

Thank you all very much! @Jon/T, brilliant suggestion.
I opened one exported .enex file in my text editor, counting <note>, <created> and <title> they were all 33, which was the number exported and imported. But one has the title "Untitled Note" (original title DIY Tips), the contents of the notes are 100%, just no title:

    <title>Untitled Note</title>
    <created>20190328T170508Z</created>
    <updated>20230505T222609Z</updated>
    <note-attributes>
      <author>Me</author>
    </note-attributes>
    <content>
    </content>
    <resource>
      <data encoding="base64"></data>
      <mime>image/png</mime>
      <width>225</width>
      <height>225</height>
      <resource-attributes>
        <file-name>image.png</file-name>
        <source-url></source-url>
      </resource-attributes>
    </resource>
  </note>

Looking at the 3 untitled notes (1 in this notebook) mentioned, 2 contain resources, e.g.:

![[./_resources/Untitled_Note.resources/image.png]]

[[./_resources/Untitled_Note.1.resources/nov 11 1.jpg]]<

but not the 3rd.

[boardtc 5]

 Sorry for the cross post.

8 minutes ago, Jon/t said:

I think in an enex file images are stored in base64 so they are really long strings hence the 54000 lines.

The key would be to count the number of <title> tags to see if they match the number of notes in the export or see if any <title></title> selections are empty.

I posted the problem note..... I'm not sure it gives any clues to why it's happening...

In the other notebook there is:

  <note>
    <title>Untitled Note</title>
    <created>20200315T141435Z</created>
    <updated>20200315T141748Z</updated>
    <note-attributes>
      <author>Me</author>
      <source>desktop.win</source>
      <source-url>mailbox:///C:/Users/Me/AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird/Profiles/h2lvkt11.default/Mail/Local%20Folders/Inbox?number=5193</source-url>
      <source-application>evernote.win32</source-application>
    </note-attributes>
    <content>
    </content>
  </note>

 

[Jon/t 792]

That's probably why you're getting untitled note in the import.

Is there anything unusual about the title DIY Tips - any emoji, odd spaces at the beginning or end?

The source url of the email is Thunderbird (just reinstalled it myself after years) and both problem notes have the same. Is this a forwarded email to Evernote?

How was it captured? If its from email are problem notes only from email?

Would be interesting to know for debugging and I can test it from my TB.

[boardtc 5]

Looking at the 3 titles in Evernote all plain ascii

• DIY Tips
• Banneton Cloth
• Soudough - billsblog

The first one mentioned was written by hand the 2 others have a TB link and a back reference link, I hand craft most but I think I may have done these 2 by sending the evernote email. But definitely not the first if we are looking for a pattern 😞

Searching TB I sent one message to Evernote in 2008 and that was it and it's not one of these 3!

[eric99 836]

23 hours ago, boardtc said:

With the current windows app I exported 2 notebooks from Evernote with all notes having a title.

One of the notebooks had 14 notes and the other 49, when imported the first notebook had 2 Untitled notes and the 2nd 1. I redid the export and import and the same happened for the same notes. I could not see a pattern as to why those particular notes have a problem - it's only the title that had an issue.

It sounds like no one had got to the bottom of this, is there an open bug somewhere?

Some additional tests to pinpoint the problem more precisely:

Does it occur if you export that particular note only?

And what if you export a duplicated note of that note? If it still occurs, you can delete the title manually, retype it again and try the export again. If it still occurs after that, you may gradually strip down the note until it doesn't occur anymore ...

 

edit: I've just checked all my enex files from the last year and didn't find any problem ( I do a global search in all my files at once)

[boardtc 5]

@eric99, excellent debugging

1. Individual export produces Untitled note.md in enex file
2. Duplicate of note produces correct title.md

I can do that for these 2 notebooks but I would prefer not to have to check my other 30+ by hand, some with 100s of notes. Still not the end of the world with this work around and a bit of grafting. Many thanks.

[eric99 836]

1 hour ago, boardtc said:

@eric99, excellent debugging

1. Individual export produces Untitled note.md in enex file
2. Duplicate of note produces correct title.md

I can do that for these 2 notebooks but I would prefer not to have to check my other 30+ by hand, some with 100s of notes. Still not the end of the world with this work around and a bit of grafting. Many thanks.

Thanks for testing!  I suggested this to diagnose the problem but I'm glad that it helps you with your export 🙂

What do we learn from this?  The most probable conclusion is what john/T already suggested: the title contains hidden characters which were removed in the duplicated note. To prove that theory you could manually remove the title in the original note and type it again. Then export to check whether the exported title is still empty.

Maybe this problem should be discussed with @Federico Simionato before destroying the traces ?

[boardtc 5]

24 minutes ago, eric99 said:

What do we learn from this?  The most probable conclusion is what john/T already suggested: the title contains hidden characters which were removed in the duplicated note. To prove that theory you could manually remove the title in the original note and type it again. Then export to check whether the exported title is still empty.

Ok, the notes was in the trash but I restored, renamed the title and exported and the .enx file contained the new file name.md. Looks like your theory proved. Strange one!

I guess there is no way to search Evernote for hidden characters?

[John in Michigan USA 108]

22 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

Correct - support by staff on technical issues is a subscribers feature.

Exactly. There's still no way for free users to submit a bug other than feedback/feature request, and we all know where those go.

Worse, Evernote treats free (and paid!) like Evernote's own beta (even alpha!) testers, with minimal or no warning, when it is convenient for Evernote. In return, we get nothing (rate of new/regressed bugs >> rate of bug fixes, so the net rate of bug fixing is negative; new, un-neccesary, mandatory, half-baked features introduce still more bugs that persist).

If they can't do better with bugs, they could at least give some sort of simple acknowledgement or dare I say thanks in return for the work we do. But that might mean acknowledging specific bugs in e.g. the release notes, which they won't do because they know their "fixed" bugs will likely return (regression) and it would be that much harder to remain in denial or complacency about them. Better to keep the community guessing, and blaming themselves for having expectations that exceed what EN can actually deliver (not that it prevents them from making promises to deliver!)

[agsteele 2,574]

3 hours ago, John in Michigan USA said:

If they can't do better with bugs, they could at least give some sort of simple acknowledgement or dare I say thanks in return for the work we do.

Do you mean like this...

 

 

 

[Jon/t 792]

9 hours ago, boardtc said:

I guess there is no way to search Evernote for hidden characters?

There isn't mainly because they're hidden lol. Some excellent investigating from @eric99 and others.

If you see it again wither rename the note and export again.

If you spot any pattern of where the note title was created from maybe look at quickly renaming those notes.

At least we worked it out.

[John in Michigan USA 108]

6 hours ago, agsteele said:

Do you mean like this...

 

 

 

Well that's something, a start. Four days after release and it is still not available to me for automatic updating. Could try the manual update from https://evernote.com/download but as we've seen so many times before, new downloads are likely to have more bugs than what they replace, occasionally are unusable. My policy has been to wait 1-4 weeks before applying upgrades if at all possible.

It *is* nice to see a thank you, but for me the verdict is out until I have some feedback from others on the new release.

From the release notes of 10.61: "We included the same fix for slow note creation that we issued on mobile last week. Desktop was in much better shape but why not"

Translated: Creating notes from the desktop was slow, maybe a tiny bit faster than on mobile, we hope, but likely haven't done much formal testing to isolate the problem; we've rolled out the slow note creation fix to both mobile and desktop, even though we don't understand the underlying problem enough to explain why mobile was worse. This fix may improve mobile, or it may make both desktop and mobile have problems. You'll let us know?

Missing:  Thank you thank you THANK YOU to our paid subscribers who are paying for the privilege of testing our code using their own, live customer data in production, so we don't have to.  Hopefully they backed up their entire DB before "testing" but who really knows? That's on them and we don't make it easy or guarantee that backup strategies (some requiring 3rd party components) that worked last week will still work this week. To show our appreciation for these suckers persistent geniuses, we're working on ways to give them perks or a discount. We tried that invite-only Beta preview but they bailed when they realized it wasn't really a preview; many new features and "fixes" skipped the preview entirely and went straight into production, where some problems were caused that could have been spotted and fixed in the preview we skipped. We'll do better. Maybe.

OK I'm exaggerating a bit to make a point but there are too many days when it feels like I'm not exaggerating at all. For example, in the three (3) days since 10.61 was released, there have been 5 patches and we are now at v. 10.61.5. I am delighted to report, I've managed to skip 4 failed updates and counting!

This isn't a release, this is beta testing at a rate of > 1 new build per night. If only there was a way to do test software on live users without risking regular users and corporate installs </sarc>

[agsteele 2,574]

10.61.5 is a security release. It doesn't change the function or features of 10.61.4.

[boardtc 5]

Interestingly, I got a comment in another forum that "webclips used to be exported to enex files with a title called "Untitled Note"."

[boardtc 5]

Ok, I grepped my other 32 exported notebooks of 500Mb of stuff and found 36 Untitled Notes in 17 files, so it's far from a once off.

[eric99 836]

Yeah, I built in some extra checks in my own HTML export tool and it discovered 28 Untitled Notes in my latest enex export

I'll try to find out which hidden characters are the culprit and how they end up in the title

[eric99 836]

On 9/5/2023 at 10:11 PM, eric99 said:

Yeah, I built in some extra checks in my own HTML export tool and it discovered 28 Untitled Notes in my latest enex export

I'll try to find out which hidden characters are the culprit and how they end up in the title

Perhaps the odd character is nbsp, which sometimes appears in enex files, making life harder for xml parsers and maybe for the enex generator as well when inside a title? I don't think it is valid enex character according the dtd file.  I look further...

 

[eric99 836]

I don't think it's the nbsp char, I inserted it in a title and the title still exports properly.

I then searched the content of the whole local database for  a note which I know is converted to 'Untitled' by enex, checked the title with notepad++ hex viewer but can't find anything special. It's a challenge to reverse engineer the database structure from a bunch of files, maybe I missed it

[boardtc 5]

A tough debugging issue.  I assumed you had access to the code, without that it's an impossible task 😞

[michaelfacey 0]

On 8/30/2023 at 10:25 PM, boardtc said:

@eric99, excellent debugging

1. Individual export produces Untitled note.md in enex file
2. Duplicate of note produces correct title.md

I can do that for these 2 notebooks but I would prefer not to have to check my other 30+ by hand, some with 100s of notes. Still not the end of the world with this work around and a bit of grafting. Many thanks.

I'm facing the same issue. Selecting the note and then copying it to a new folder works well. Seems to "reset" the title. Is there a way to "Copy to..." multiple notes at a time? It's very tedious doing this one by one.

[boardtc 5]

@eric99 Do you think there's enough here for us to convert this into an official bug now?

[Jon/t 792]

On 9/7/2023 at 10:06 AM, eric99 said:

I don't think it's the nbsp char,

No, don't think it would be the &nbsp as its just a non-breaking space and quite common to use.

Would be worth sending in a support ticket with the URL of this thread... looks like 3 folk are reporting the same so may be an issue.

[boardtc 5]

It's a bit of a farce trying to raise a bug:

[Jon/t 792]

Technical support is a paid feature. Maybe someone who has a plan and is having the problem can submit a ticket. They may want to see the untitled note exports.

[eric99 836]

3 hours ago, Jon/t said:

Technical support is a paid feature. Maybe someone who has a plan and is having the problem can submit a ticket. They may want to see the untitled note exports.

It's definitely a bug. If they tried to fix it, I don't think they would need the export of the untitled notes, but the note itself.

But I'm tired of submitting tickets that never get resolved. If they tell me they are seriously considering fixing it, I can provide a problem note. Then they should be able to solve it within 5 minutes.