Export Notebook as Text (in 13.3 &14)

Question

What is the best way to export a notebook as readable plaintext - while preserving as much structure as possible? The motivation here is the need to bulk-ingest notebooks and chunk them (for use in RAG systems).

In such a solution for example:

textual elements would be stripped of styling
section headings would be preserved
cell-tags could be listed underneath cell contents
For non-text elements - those would be simply replaced with their notebook asset filepaths/hyperlinks
...

There were a few legacy answers about exporting to multi-markup/down that are now out of date, but is there any new "best way" to achieve this in v13.3/14?

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 01 '23 at 20:00

I recently found myself in a similar situation where I wanted text-only but structured files generated from my notebooks for source control and revision tracking. I could not find an optimal solution, but ultimately I landed on exporting the notebooks as a package (*.m) file.

The following code essentially automates the process of opening each file in the front end, and then selecting "Save As..." in the File menu and choosing the "*.m" package option.

I wrote a helper function to do the following:

obtain the notebook object for the notebook of interest: first retrieve a list of objects for all currently open notebooks, then open the one of interest (the RunProcess part), then retrieve a list of all open notebooks again, and take the difference;
generate a new file name with a modified extension, replacing ".nb" with ".m"
save the notebook in "Package" format with the new name using front end tokens (i.e. menu items);
close the notebook.

My files were all in a single directory, so I just mapped this function over a list of notebook file names.

dir = SetDirectory["C:\\path\\to\\the\\files"];
files = FileNames["*.nb"];
ClearAll[openSaveNB]
openSaveNB[name_] := Module[
  {nbObject, before, newName},
  before = Notebooks[];
  RunProcess[{"cmd", "/c", name}];
  nbObject = First@ Complement[Notebooks[], before];
  newName = FileNameJoin[{dir, StringReplace[name, ".nb" -> ".m"]}];
  FrontEndTokenExecute[nbObject, "Save", {newName, "Package"}];
  FrontEndTokenExecute[nbObject, "Close"]
]
openSaveNB /@ files

The process itself worked; I am still figuring out if the output is acceptable for my goals, but I thought I'd share the process anyway in case you find it useful.

A couple of caveats: 1) I work in Windows and the code makes the assumption that *.nb files are associated with Mathematica, so that invoking one such file in the shell automatically opens it; 2) in FrontEndTokenExecute[nbObject, "Save", {newName, "Package"}], newName should be a fully qualified file name, with the directory as well, otherwise the resulting file is saved in some default location that ignores the SetDirectory directive.

I've been using recipe suggested here and it works except when I copy/pasted some graphics into notebook manually, like here, in which case some of my notebooks become 300MB package files, also looking for a solution that does text-only — Yaroslav Bulatov, Dec 03 '23 at 07:38

Export Notebook as Text (in 13.3 &14)

1 Answers1