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Exporting Your Bookmarks From Google Reader

Tue Jul 4, 14:19

Today I wanted to export my bookmarks from Google Reader so I could tag them in del.icio.us. I found that the easiest way to do it was to export my list of subscriptions to OPML and use Ruby's REXML library to extract the URLs that I wanted.

  1. First step, export your subscription list and save it as ~/greader.opml
  2. Run this Ruby script from ~: 
    require "rexml/document"

opml = REXML::Document.new(File.new( 'greader.opml' ))

#REXML lets you use an XPath expression to select elements, then iterate over them
sites = opml.elements.map('opml/body/outline/outline') do |outline|
  [ outline.attributes['text'], outline.attributes['htmlUrl'] ]
end

File.open( 'bookmarks.html', 'w' ) do |output_file|
  output_file << '<html><body>'
  
  sites.uniq.sort.each do |site|
    output_file << "<a href='#{site[1]}'>#{site[0]}</a> <br/>"
  end
  
  output_file << '</body></html>'
end
  3. Now, you will have a file ~/bookmarks.html that lists all of the websites that you had RSS/Atom feeds to in Google Reader.

I opened my bookmarks.html file in my browser and used the del.icio.us extension to tag them all, but you can use them however you like.

Enjoy!

Posted by Mike Nicholaides Filed in code, google, howto, opml, programming, rexml, ruby, scripting, tips, xml