Letterboxd to Markdown Update: Folder Dates for Rewatched Films

A while back I wrote a small script for converting my Letterboxd data to Markdown. However, using it over the last couple of months it’s clear that I needed a better strategy for dealing with rewatches.

The original script would check if a film’s folder name already existed, and skip it if that was the case. Except…for a rewatch I actually want to log the film again. I was dealing with this in an ad-hoc fashion, renaming the earlier log entry to something like filmname-1, but this manual process felt unsustainable.

Enter: dates. I’m now appending the date to the film name by default, so there would be no collisions with future rewatches:

const filmStub = filmURIParts[5];
const watchedDateFormatted = await this.readableDate(watchedDate);
const filmFolder = `${filmStub}-${watchedDateFormatted}`;
const parentFolder = process.env.OUTPUT_DIR;
const folderName = `./${parentFolder}/${filmFolder}`; // this is always going to be the film path
const posterImagePath = `/${parentFolder}/${filmFolder}/${filmStub}.jpg`;

I’m using Luxon to help with dates in a helper function:

this.readableDate = async (dateObj) => {
	if (typeof dateObj === 'string') {
		return DateTime.fromISO(dateObj, { zone: "utc" }).toFormat(
			"yyyyMMdd"
		);
	} else {
		return DateTime.fromJSDate(dateObj, { zone: "utc" }).toFormat(
			"yyyyMMdd"
		);
	}
}

Full code is available on Github.