Import

content/posts/2012-12-08-import-things-tasks-into-apples-reminders.md

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+---
+title: Import Things tasks into Apple’s Reminders
+author: james
+type: post
+date: 2012-12-08T13:36:46+00:00
+url: /2012/12/import-things-tasks-into-apples-reminders/
+dsq_thread_id:
+  - 964365161
+categories:
+  - Apple
+  - Hacks
+
+---
+OK, so I was making a list of things to do today, but then I decided that having created them in Things, I wanted to move them to Apple’s Reminders. Don’t ask – I’m a task list fetishist.
+
+A neat trick you can do with Cultured Code&#8217;s <a href="http://culturedcode.com/things/" target="_blank">Things</a> is to select a bunch of tasks and drag them to a text editor, which will create one line per task with any note appended in brackets. Looks sort of like this:
+
+<pre class="lang:default highlight:0 decode:true " title="Things export" >- Make lists of things
+- Procrastinate (Try making scripts to manage lists of things)
+</pre>
+
+This is all very well, but there&#8217;s no simple way to get that list into Reminders without copying and pasting the relevant bits individually. That sounded boring, so instead I learned enough AppleScript to do it automatically. It probably took more time, but it was definitely more amusing. Anyway, it was that or complete the bunch of tasks I&#8217;d just written down.
+
+Here&#8217;s the AppleScript code to accomplish this feat.
+
+<pre class="lang:applescript decode:true " title="Reminders Importer" >-- Reminders Importer
+-- James McDonald &lt;james@jamesmcdonald.com&gt;
+
+-- Imports a text file into Reminders as one task per line.
+-- Creates a task list called "Import". Strips off " -" at the start and puts bracketed text into the body (note) of the task. This is the format you get by dragging from Things to a text editor.
+
+tell application "Reminders"
+	if not (list "Import" exists) then
+		make list with properties {name:"Import"}
+	else
+		tell list "Import" to delete reminders
+	end if
+end tell
+
+tell application "Reminders"
+	repeat with l in paragraphs of (read file "Users:james:Documents:tasks.txt")
+		if length of l is not 0 then
+			if l starts with "- " then
+				set l to characters 3 through end of l as text
+			end if
+			
+			if l contains "(" then
+				set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "("
+				set b to text item 2 of l
+				set l to text item 1 of l
+				set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ")"
+				set b to text item 1 of b
+				set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""
+			else
+				set b to "" as text
+			end if
+			tell list "Import"
+				make reminder with properties {name:l, body:b}
+			end tell
+		end if
+	end repeat
+end tell
+</pre>
+
+Yes, I know. AppleScript is weird.
+
+So, now that I&#8217;ve written the blog post about the script to migrate to one task manager from another the list of tasks I made of things to do this morning, it&#8217;s this afternoon. Yay!