[Camino] History.dat file 'decrytor' resources

[Jim Witte]

On Mar 13, 2008, at 2:03 AM, Rajaram S. Gaunker wrote:

> Is there an easy way to get a report of the history in plain text or
> pdf. The "Print" option under File is not able to be selected when
> viewing the history.
> I looked at the history.dat file and have not been able to find..

   Short answer - not that I know of.

   Longer answer:

   There's a perl script out  called Mork there that will decode the  
rather cryptic (to put it MILDLY) history.dat files Mozilla browsers  
produce.  I don't know if the history.dat file structure has changed  
since this was done - so something more sane (like Safari's  
LastSession file perhpas?), or to something that breaks Mork,  
although I'd think not..  The file is cryptic enough as it is..

   I'm not aware of something that will take the output of Mork  
(whatever form it's in - it's text is all I know), and turn it into a  
PDF file, but PDF generators are a dime a dozen it seems.  There may  
be a fully formed too out there.  Perhaps even the Mozilla project  
has done it..  Remaking the history.dat file into something more  
human reabable, even if it does take up more space would be a better  
idea (there is a bit on the 'rant' page about history.dat that is  
apparently uses 2-byte character encoding for EVERYTHING, even 1-byte  
URls [most if not all URLs in the roman alphabet].  But..  that would  
require chaning things all the way back down in the Mozilla base.  Or  
forking the Camino history, which would be hard, and possibly create  
problems with interoperability with other Mozilla browsers (IS there  
interoperability between the history files of different Mozilla things?)

   If you're a Cocoa programmer, you might try looking at the  
bookmark window code for Camino and see how it works (I haven't)  I  
imagine it just calls routines in the Mozilla base that can pull  
stuff out of the history.dat file as needed.

   But Mork is probably the easiest bet to get SOMETING out of the  
history file.

Jim

These two URLs will get you started:

http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=perl+mozill 
+history.dat&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2004/04/19/mork.html