I used to use springpad.com to take notes on my iPad and Android phone, but ended up switching to just using plain text files, synced with Dropbox for speed and simplicity. However this left me with a few hundred notes tied into Springpad’s ecosystem that I wanted to suck out…

Thankfully Springpad lets you create backups (in settings->services) and download them as on big html file, which with a little magic can be converted into a series of plain text files, and with a little more magic can even be put into folders corresponding to the notebook they were stored in with Springpad!

But How!?

I’m glad you asked! I’ve written a litte ruby script which you can download from gist and run from the command line.

It only exports text notes and books, and there are sometimes some funky characters that invade notes that are rich text, but minor issues…