I am a voracious hoarder of quotations. As I read, I tend to jot them down in my Field Notes notebook and then (usually) type them into Quotebook. It's a well designed and convenient app for collecting such things.
But sometimes I don't want to view my quotes individually. I may want to, say, see every quote by a specific author at once. Quotebook doesn't have a UI for this, but it does let you export all of your quotes into a friendly csv formatted file1. So I wrote a Python script to take that file and turn it into HTML, grouping the quotes alphabetically by author2:
import csv
quotes = []
with open('Quotes.csv', 'rb') as csvfile:
quotes_file = csv.reader(csvfile)
for row in quotes_file:
quotes.append(row)
authors = set([a[1] for a in quotes if a[1] != ' '])
authors = list(authors)
authors.sort()
grouped_quotes = {a:[] for a in authors}
for author in authors:
for quote in quotes:
if quote[1] == author:
grouped_quotes[author].append((quote[0], quote[2]))
out = """<html>
<head>
<title>Quotes</title>
</head>
<body>
"""
for author in authors:
out += "<h2>%s</h2>" % author
for quote in grouped_quotes[author]:
out += """
<p>
%s
<br>
<em>%s</em>
</p>
""" % quote
out += """
</body>
</html>"""
with open('quotes.html', 'w') as outfile:
outfile.write(out)
Is there a better, more Pythonic way of doing it? I guarantee it. But I need to maintain my reputation as a total hack....
-
Unfortunately, Quotebook only gives you two export options: email or iTunes sharing. So right now getting the data file somewhere useful is a bit of a manual process. Maybe one day they'll add a Dropbox export option and then you could hook the script up to Hazel. ↩
-
Unattributed quotes are not included, but you can change that by editing the list comprehension in line 10 to
authors = set([a[1] for a in quotes])if you like. ↩
Comments !