How to Export Zendesk Guide Data as CSV

@Jeff Callahan, getting posts would be a different API endpoint, and posts don't have all the same properties that articles do. I think it would not be a difficult modification of the script, to change the API endpoint and change some of the properties being exported. Information on the post API and properties is at  https://developer.zendesk.com/rest_api/docs/help_center/posts/. I guess you would need to change this:

 url = 'https://' + subdomain +'.zendesk.com/api/v2/help_center/en-us/articles.json?sort_by=title&sort_order=asc'

to something like this:

 url = 'https://' + subdomain +'.zendesk.com/api/v2/help_center/community/posts.json'

(adding sorting if you didn't want the default order of sorted by created_at)

And you would need to remove the code that gets article properties that don't exist in posts (section_id, draft), then if you want the post details, add code to get the details property, and you'd probably want to change some of the column names.

@Diogenez, yes, I'm using Excel, so I formatted the columns to numbers with no decimal places. I just thought it was interesting that in the YouTube video that showed this export being done, his resulting CSV file didn't need to have the formatting changed, and didn't have empty rows.

Hi Scott...Thanks for publishing this. I was able to successfully run the python script and pull articles from our instance. However, it only found 106 articles and I have 372 published articles. I am an admin within the ZD environment and I verified that it was pulling articles that I wasn't an author of, but not sure what I am missing to pull the other articles. I appreciate your assistance!

Hello 366251110588,

Hopefully, 366290875688 will be able to come back and respond to your request. In the meantime, this article on Creating and Editing Articles might have some helpful information. 

Best regards. 

Hi Devan,

The only solution for a list of IDs is Scott's script. I had to send this post and Scott's links to someone else in my org, because I don't have API access. But I had to get all the Section IDs (which actually would work, with a "Remove Duplicates" in the output file, which is now on Google Sheets) to integrate Pendo with Zendesk on our product.

Pendo is becoming really big. To allow for easier integration, Zendesk really should offer an export of article and section data, natively. For your Feature Request list.

Hi 366251110588,

Sorry for the delayed response.

I am assuming aren't successfully exporting your "internal" articles, or those not viewable to everyone, when you run the script. Is that true?

If you haven't tried already, give the Oauth script a shot:
https://github.com/scotthavard92/Zendesk-Help-Center-Export-Scripts/tree/master/Article_Information_Export#exporting-internal-articles-using-oauth

When I run the script not using Oauth it doesn't return any of our "internal" articles.

When I do use the Oauth script it dumps everything other than archived articles.

Let us know if that helps solve it!

Thanks 366290875688 that did the trick! Greatly appreciate you responding and creating this script.

@Scott, 

I get the following error 

File "C:\Users\********\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python38\lib\encodings\cp1252.py", line 19, in encode
return codecs.charmap_encode(input,self.errors,encoding_table)[0]
UnicodeEncodeError: 'charmap' codec can't encode character '\u2212' in position 17650: character maps to <undefined>

I have tried replacing ‘NFKD’ with ‘NFKC’, 'NFD', and 'NFC' and maybe I am not correctly modifying the code as Karen said. But I do have some Chinese and Japanese articles if that helps. 

Mike

Hi @Scott Havard 👋

Thanks so much for the awesome script and instructions! When I exported the file, it only seemed to include our public facing articles (permissions = visible to everyone) but didn't include our internal articles (permissions = visible to agents and managers). I couldn't spot anything in the script I could tweak and wanted to see if you had any suggestions?

Many thanks,

Hannah

This was extremely helpful and comprehensive. Thank you!

Just a quick note for those who use SSO (we do with Google) - I simply entered my Google password when authenticating during the export and it worked!

Hi everybody,
I've been working on an app that enables you to export a list of all articles in Zendesk Guide and their content. The broken links & images for each article are automatically detected and provided in the export. Both at no cost.
It is available on Zendesk's apps marketplace: Help Center Export
---

This comment has been edited by the Zendesk Community Team so that the link conforms to our Community Code of Conduct

Hello Zendesk! (Maybe @Brett Bowser?) 

I previously have been advising on using OAuth to export all articles. I recently have found that using OAuth doesn't actually export that data by default anymore! Now using Basic Auth or OAuth only exports the fully public/published docs.

Any way to work around this? I tried to edit the endpoint to specify the internal section and category, but it returns no data. 

This may have been a security thing? The OAuth token should be enough security in its own. Either way, most of us need the exports to include internal articles. Would love if the endpoint got reverted or to get an advice on a different approach. I can edit my scripts to try and help enable this for everyone else!

Alternatively, if someone is still having success exporting articles internally let us know! It could be good to rule out any settings that we have configured on our end. 

Wondering if anyone has discovered or developed a workaround for the OAuth issue that results in only exporting published articles but not unpublished/internal articles.

So, we had to install "The Unarchiver" from the Mac App Store to open the zip file (rar).  I had to also use IDLE to open/edit the script.

I got slightly confused. I thought that .zip archive is a different format, other than .rar. For instance, the information about CSV format backup was clear. But I am still confused about how to convert rar into zip.

Hey @scott26 , |The YouTube video you linked to in your help documentation, both here and on GitHub, seems to be down/deleted. I am hitting some walls and hope you might be able to put that video back up. Thanks for all your support

Hi, 

Here’s another variant: Help Desk Migration can export your Zendesk Guide data into CSV files with complete structure and content. It includes:

• Article body in HTML format to preserve layout and formatting
• Inline images and file attachments
• Categories and sections
   

You can also choose to migrate categories and folders separately if needed.

If you have individual Help Centers for each Zendesk brand, you’ll need to run a separate data migration for each one. This ensures the content stays organized and properly mapped across all brands.