Meal plan history sperlunking

For the last few years I've kept a meal plan in Apple notes. Each one is a separate note looking something like this:

2023-01-30

- Falafels
- Maangchi pork belly
- Leftovers
- Veg wraps
- Chicken gyros (https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/chicken-gyros)
- Jacket potatoes with beans, cheese and something tasty
- Clearout

There are a few variations, and some contain shopping lists, lunch lists, or short notes saying we'll be away somewhere to make planning/shopping easier.

I want to see patterns in how we eat (or at least plan to), and resurface popular but forgotten meals from years gone by.

This is a tool I hacked together for Remote Hack. It is hacky and could do anything. Don't trust it!

Running the tool

Export the notes using this. Place them in the icloud_notes_export directory.
Run bundle if you haven't already, to install the dependencies.
Run bundle exec ruby summarise_meal_plans.rb

Naming assumptions

I've been working with a flat export so we can't use the folder location to identify meal plan notes.

Instead we match on notes that are exactly "YYYY-MM-DD" in Apple Notes.

This translates to Notes[YYYY-MM-DD].txt in the export.

Export notes from iCloud

HTML export with an unchecked tool

We can export notes from Apple Notes with this. It's not great – everything is exported into a flat folder structure, but it's HTML so easier to parse :)

Direct access to the notes SQLite database

iCloud-synced notes are stored in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes/Data/CloudKit/cloudd_db/.

There are three files:

db, contains the data we're after in an SQLite database
db.shm, indexes for the write-ahead log
db.wal, the write-ahead log

We can inspect the data with Datasette.

The database doesn't look like it contains anything useful :(.

spikeheap / apple_notes_meal_plan_summariser