wormi4ok/evernote2md

Fix encoding issues causing corrupted characters in Markdown output

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#143 opened on Mar 29, 2026

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good first issue

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Description

Hi there,

First off, thanks for building this tool. It's been really useful for getting my notes out of Evernote.

I noticed that after converting my .enex files, a lot of the exported .md files have garbled characters. Things like ’ instead of an apostrophe, “ instead of a quote, â€" instead of an em dash, and stray à and  characters showing up throughout. It looks like an encoding mismatch during conversion, probably Windows-1252 content being read as UTF-8.

Right now I'm running a separate Python script after conversion using a library called 'ftfy' that detects and reverses the encoding issues. It works well, but it would be great to have something like this built into evernote2md so users don't need a second tool.

Happy to help however I can. Thanks again for the tool!

Contributor guide

Research direction
Identify where the .enex file is read and decoded. Check current encoding assumptions and add detection for Windows 1252 or other common encodings. Consider using Go's encoding packages (e.g., golang.org/x/text/encoding/charmap) to convert to UTF 8 during parsing.
Tech stack
go
Domain
backend
Issue type
Bug
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
2
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
1-3 hours
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
Active
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
Clear
Prerequisites
GitGo
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
75