Update:

I’ve completed this process and posted a new blog entry about it: Read the latest update on this process

I’ve been working on converting all of my text based data to markdown to make it more portable.

I’ve found a great iOS app to use for my recipes, using Grocery App, which I covered yesterday.

Now the problem is that I need to get all my recipes out of Paprika 3 and into markdown. This post will cover that process as it unfolds, and provide the code needed if you come across the same problem.

The general plan

At this point I’ve only done a quick review of what options Paprika provides for an export:

  • HTML
  • Paprika Format

The HTML code generated wasn’t bad & I considered using pandoc, but I need to do a little additional formatting to get the data into the format Grocery App wants. And I like the format Grocery is using so I’m going all in with that.

So option two was Paprika Format, it turns out it isn’t too bad & should be easy to script.

What I know so far:

  • In Paprika 3 choose File -> Export…
  • Provide a name & location
  • Categories: All Recipes
  • Format: Paprika Recipe Format

  • Click Export

  • This will provide a single file My Recipes.paprikarecipes (plural)
  • CD to where this file was extracted
  • running the linux/macOS command file My\ Recipes.paprikarecipes on this tells us it is a Zip archive.
  • So we just need to run a simple unzip My\ Recipes.paprikarecipes to extract the file.
  • remove this file so it doesn’t cause future problems rm 'My Recipes.paprikarecipes'
  • We now have a whole bunch of *.paprikarecipe (singular) files, these are oddly gzip files
  • run gunzip to extract these gunzip *.paprikarecipe
  • make sure rename is installed: brew install rename
  • rename files to .gz from .paprikarecipe rename s/\.paprikarecipe/\.gz/g *.paprikarecipe
  • extract all the recipes gunzip *.gz
  • the files are now json format so rename them with the right extension rename s/$/\.json/g *