Editing abook.mab file
William B. Lurie
Is there a way to format it, decode or delimit it,
so that it becomes readable and can be edited?
I can't seem to get Notepad or Editpad to do it.
Ron K.
announced:
It is a Mork type of databse. Try exporting it to either a .cvs file
which is comma delimited or a Tab dilmited file. If you do the .csv you
can edit that with MS Excel or other spreadsheet application. If you
edit in a word processor you have to be carful to not save it in any
toher format but plain text.
Excel can export .csv, so the edits can mer Imported to Abook into a new
empth address book.
--
Ron K.
Don't be a fonted, it's just type casting
Wayne Mery
> I use a number of scientifically-oriented programs, but I do
> no programming in Excel or Office or Word or Quicken. APL is my language
> of choice. I don't understand "Export to a .cvs file".
from thunderbird:
tools
address book
export
"save as type" set per your requirements
afaik there is no tool which will directly edit the mork-based file.
William B. Lurie
From TB
Tools
Address Book.....
Export? How? Where do I find that option?
Nir
> From TB
> Tools
> Address Book.....
> Export? How? Where do I find that option?
In Thunderbird , Tools>Address Book > Tools > Export
Christopher Jahn
news:2tWdnf9jpY7Qkyrb...@mozilla.org:
Note that you must do this from the Address Book; you won't find
Address Book commands when it is closed.
--
}:-) Christopher Jahn
{:-( http://soflatheatre.blogspot.com/
All hope abandon, ye who enter here.
William B. Lurie
I use a number of scientifically-oriented programs, but I do
no programming in Excel or Office or Word or Quicken. APL is my language
understand changing the extension but you didn't say that. Did
you want me to simply change the extension to .txt and
export it from there? All Mork means to me is Robin Williams
without Mindy.
Andrew DeFaria
afaik there is no tool which will directly edit the mork-based file.
--
Andrew DeFaria
Why are they called apartments, when they're all stuck together?
William B. Lurie
Thanks, Nir..... I see more responses below, not read yet.
Yours led me to a way to make a .ldif file, which I
partially opened to abook1,2, and 3, and it let me look
at two and denied me access to the third.
It also showed me how to convert to .csv format and now
I'm able to read the file sensibly.
I'm hoping to find, eventually, the old obsolete addresses
that I can't see in the regular Address Book tabulation,
so that I can delete them. If I succeed, I'll still have
the problem of putting my abook.mab back together again.
Y'know, TB is wonderful, and does a zillion things well
that I could never have expected. But the simple matter of
getting rid of an old address that it pulls up into my "To"
line, finding where it is and deleting it.......that is the
'Zilla bug that a nice helpful reader is posting for me.
William B. Lurie
> Wayne Mery wrote:
>> afaik there is no tool which will directly edit the mork-based file.
> that's screwy <http://jwz.livejournal.com/312657.html> and as such you
> when it's gotten corrupted in the past.
> --
> Why are they called apartments, when they're all stuck together?
reading it all un-delimited is impractical.
Opening it up into .csv files was very helpful,
but I still have two unanswerd problems:
1. I haven't been led yet to the address book file
that contains old addresses that it pulls up., and
2. When somehow somebody leads me to that address
book file, and I edit it.......I have no way to
put it back where it was.
Peter Potamus the Purple Hippo
instead of mucking around with the .cvs file, try this. I
did this and found extra email addresses I forgot about.
From the address book, over on the far right of the
listings of addresses, you will see a little icon that looks
like a bent arrow. If you click on that and select
Additional Email. Now, do you see any other email addresses
that shouldn't belong?
--
Please do not email me for help. Reply to the newsgroup
only. And only click on the Reply button, not the Reply All
or Reply to Author. Thanks!
Peter Potamus & His Magic Flying Balloon:
http://www.toonopedia.com/potamus.htm
William B. Lurie
but I was just offered TB 2.0.x and installed it, and now that
privilege is tehere. I'll work with it. But this new TB has differences
that I have to resolve....
lyle
> Wayne Mery wrote:
> Actually any old editor can edit a mork-based file. It's the *format*
> that's screwy <http://jwz.livejournal.com/312657.html> and as such you
> probably don't want to touch it with an editor.
I think the format is quite useful and not that obscure. Here is my
summary (emphasis on summary here) of the fundamentals using the TB
address book as an example.
First there are pointers to fields or properties or columns.
[<23=firstname><37=lastname><56=emailaddress><8=uniqueidentity>]
Secondly there are pointers to data or atomic entries (single gobs of
data).
[<17=Ali><92=Lyle><101=Baba><56=New York
City><223=ab...@secretcave.com>]
They go together to make up entities [ ... ] as
<column,atom>
with symbols that indicate whether the entry is a pointer (^) or data
(=)
[<^23^17><^37^101><^56^223><^8=15>] which is an entry for entry 15,
Ali Baba whose e-mail is ab...@secretcave.com. A susbsequent entry for
entry 15 will supercede the previous entry for entry 15.
I like the notion that if we know a whole family of Babas, the string
"Baba" will be entered only once as in <101=Baba> and each of our Baba
contact's last names will be indicated by <^37^101>. Well we might not
know a lot of Babas, but we might know a lot of people in New York
City.
The actual syntax is extended beyond that. But I think that what I
have written is sufficient to interpet/translate the file. Using
regular expressions makes parsing the file quite fast. A VBA
manifestation of this can be seen at
http://www.ffdba.com/downloads/UpDate_Outlook_Contacts_From_Thunderbird_AddressBook.htm.
I haven't studied mork extensively, of course, and don't pretend to be
an expert. I wrote a little VBA code to import my ten Sunbird iCals
into Outlook (because doing ten interactively was tedious) so that I
could sync them with my Palm Pilot and the procedure seemed unfinished
without a similar TB address book import. I am not a fan of VBA, but
it's what you use within Outlook.
Andrew DeFaria
Andrew is right. I can open and edit the file, but reading it all un-delimited is impractical.
Opening it up into .csv files was very helpful, but I still have two unanswerd problems:
1. I haven't been led yet to the address book file that contains old addresses that it pulls up., and
2. When somehow somebody leads me to that address book file, and I edit it.......I have no way to put it back where it was.
--
Andrew DeFaria
Why are there tags on blow-dryers that say Do Not Use In The Shower? Is this really a problem?
Andrew DeFaria
############################################################################## # # And Now, The Ugly Truth Laid Bare: # # In Netscape Navigator 1.0 through 4.0, the history.db file was just a # Berkeley DBM file. You could trivially bind to it from Perl, and # pull out the URLs and last-access time. In Mozilla, this has been # replaced with a "Mork" database for which no tools exist. # # Let me make it clear that McCusker is a complete barking lunatic. # This is just about the stupidest file format I've ever seen. # # http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/arch/mork/primer.txt # http://jwz.livejournal.com/312657.html # http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html # http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=241438 # # In brief, let's count its sins: # # - Two different numerical namespaces that overlap. # # - It can't decide what kind of character-quoting syntax to use: # Backslash? Hex encoding with dollar-sign? # # - C++ line comments are allowed sometimes, but sometimes // is just # a pair of characters in a URL. # # - It goes to all this serious compression effort (two different # string-interning hash tables) and then writes out Unicode strings # without using UTF-8: writes out the unpacked wchar_t characters! # # - Worse, it hex-encodes each wchar_t with a 3-byte encoding, # meaning the file size will be 3x or 6x (depending on whether # whchar_t is 2 bytes or 4 bytes.) # # - It masquerades as a "textual" file format when in fact it's just # another binary-blob file, except that it represents all its magic # numbers in ASCII. It's not human-readable, it's not hand-editable, # so the only benefit there is to the fact that it uses short lines # and doesn't use binary characters is that it makes the file bigger. # Oh wait, my mistake, that isn't actually a benefit at all. # # Pure comedy. # ##############################################################################
I haven't studied mork extensively, of course, and don't pretend to be
an expert. I wrote a little VBA code to import my ten Sunbird iCals
into Outlook (because doing ten interactively was tedious) so that I
could sync them with my Palm Pilot and the procedure seemed unfinished
without a similar TB address book import. I am not a fan of VBA, but
it's what you use within Outlook.
lyle
> Why do croutons come in airtight packages? It's just stale bread to
> begin with.
If you want something slow, ugly and insecure it's pretty well you're
best choice. Did I mention expensive?
Andrew DeFaria
If you want something slow, ugly and insecure it's pretty well you're best choice. Did I mention expensive?
William B. Lurie
> lyle wrote:
>> If you want something slow, ugly and insecure it's pretty well you're
>> best choice. Did I mention expensive?
> You left out poorly designed! There's a ton of OSS that blows your
> theory out of the water!
> --
> Earth First! We'll strip mine the other planets later.
The snide remarks notwithstanding, *.mab and its intricacies
make it the most awkward, involved, and intractable format I
have ever tried to edit. It's as though somebody set out with
their prime goal being to create the most difficult database
system possible.
lyle
The snide remarks were about Outlook, not about Abook.mab and were
prompted by wanting to explain what Outlook had to do with it; I'll
try one more time: I wanted to transfer my Thunderbird Address Book to
my Palm Pilot. Palm provides free synchronizing conduits for Outlook.
So a free but clumsy approach is TB -> Outlook -> Palm. To make this
process, less clumsy I decided to do the TB-> Outlook part
"programatically", by running some code, rather than interactively,
using the UI to export and import. To write the code I had to study
the file format, which is said to be Mork.
Of course, if I liked Outlook (I've used it since its inception back
in whenever [1992?]) all this would be redundant; I would just use
Outlook and not Thunderbird so no abook.mab and no transfer. Hence the
remarks about Outlook.
I did not find Mork to be a BAD format. It seems entirely logical and
enormously efficient. Maybe it's fast too?
I can edit abook.mab with the notebook utility, more or less
painlessly. Bur perhaps my edit requirements are not as challenging as
yours. If you describe to us in more detail what kind of edit you
want to do, perhaps someone will suggest something. It's not likely to
be me, as I am off on holidays where there is no Outlook, TB, or even
wires, and all the little electrons are hidden. A few weeks of this is
a good thing.
Wayne Mery
> ...
> prompted by wanting to explain what Outlook had to do with it; I'll
> try one more time: I wanted to transfer my Thunderbird Address Book to
> my Palm Pilot. Palm provides free synchronizing conduits for Outlook.
> So a free but clumsy approach is TB -> Outlook -> Palm. To make this
> process, less clumsy I decided to do the TB-> Outlook part
> "programatically", by running some code, rather than interactively,
> using the UI to export and import.
not sure how palm got into this but...
so you wrote some code to sync to palm?
Jay Garcia
--- Original Message ---
> I'll
> try one more time: I wanted to transfer my Thunderbird Address Book to
> my Palm Pilot. Palm provides free synchronizing conduits for Outlook.
> So a free but clumsy approach is TB -> Outlook -> Palm. To make this
> process, less clumsy I decided to do the TB-> Outlook part
> "programatically", by running some code, rather than interactively,
> using the UI to export and import. To write the code I had to study
> the file format, which is said to be Mork.
Maybe this?
http://kb.mozillazine.org/PalmSync_(Thunderbird)
--
Jay Garcia Netscape/Mozilla Champion
UFAQ - http://www.UFAQ.org
lyle
I wish I had (wrote/written some code to sync to palm).
I do the Palm thing because I'm a geocacher. I wrote code to create a
simple text file of a geocache site that I can import into my Palm
Pilot using Documents to Go (a freebie on the Palm CD).
That led to wanting my Palm fully utilized.
So I imported my Sunbird iCals into Outlook to sync with the Palm. But
I had ten iCals. Doing them interactively was tedious.So I wrote code
to import the iCals into Outlook.
The Palm looked bare without any addresses.
Adding a TB Address Book import just seemed to tidy the whole thung up
a bit.
So I wrote code to import the TB address book to Outlook. That's when
I had to find out a little about Mork.
Ain't dominoes grand?
I sync the whole thing (now in Outlook) to Palm. The whole thing,
running the code and doing the sync is less than a minute.
The direct sync to Palm would be great but I don't have time for that.
The whole import coding to Outlook took only a few hours.
I'm a database and web person. I'm stretching to be in this
conversaton at all. Be kind.
Chris Ilias
> The snide remarks notwithstanding, *.mab and its intricacies
> make it the most awkward, involved, and intractable format I
> have ever tried to edit. It's as though somebody set out with
> their prime goal being to create the most difficult database
> system possible.
You should be using Thunderbird to edit your Thunderbird address books,
in the first place.
--
Chris Ilias <http://ilias.ca>
List-owner: support-firefox, support-thunderbird, test-multimedia
Andrew DeFaria
Andrew DeFaria
On Aug 7, 7:14 am, "William B. Lurie" <billu...@nospam.net> wrote:
Andrew DeFaria wrote:The snide remarks were about Outlook, not about Abook.mab
lyle wrote:The snide remarks notwithstanding, *.mab and its intricacies make it the most awkward, involved, and intractable format I have ever tried to edit. It's as though somebody set out with their prime goal being to create the most difficult database
If you want something slow, ugly and insecure it's pretty well you'reYou left out poorly designed! There's a ton of OSS that blows your theory out of the water!
best choice. Did I mention expensive?
--
Andrew DeFaria <http://defaria.com>
Earth First! We'll strip mine the other planets later.
system possible.
and were prompted by wanting to explain what Outlook had to do with it; I'll try one more time: I wanted to transfer my Thunderbird Address Book to my Palm Pilot. Palm provides free synchronizing conduits for Outlook.
So a free but clumsy approach is TB -> Outlook -> Palm. To make this process, less clumsy I decided to do the TB-> Outlook part "programatically", by running some code, rather than interactively, using the UI to export and import.
To write the code I had to study the file format, which is said to be Mork. Of course, if I liked Outlook (I've used it since its inception back in whenever [1992?]) all this would be redundant; I would just use Outlook and not Thunderbird so no abook.mab and no transfer. Hence the remarks about Outlook.
I did not find Mork to be a BAD format. It seems entirely logical and enormously efficient. Maybe it's fast too?
And how frigging fast does an addressbook need to be? This is not myspace and you don't have thousands of friends. Nor do you have thousands of addressbook cards and even if you did just about any program/format should be able to handle them on a modern computer fast enough that you'd not be able to tell the difference.
I can edit abook.mab with the notebook utility, more or less painlessly.
Andrew DeFaria
I tried to backup my hard drive but I couldn't figure out how to put it in reverse
William B. Lurie
> On 8/7/07 7:14 AM, _William B. Lurie_ spoke thusly:
>> The snide remarks notwithstanding, *.mab and its intricacies
>> make it the most awkward, involved, and intractable format I
>> have ever tried to edit. It's as though somebody set out with
>> their prime goal being to create the most difficult database
>> system possible.
>
> You should be using Thunderbird to edit your Thunderbird address books,
> in the first place.
Chris, of course I started there. If you follow the thread
back, you'll find that e-mail addresses pop-up when I type
a few letters, some being valid and some obsolete, that I'd
like to delete. But the addresses that I want to delete do
not appear in my TB Address book. And when I expand abook.mab
(no trivial task in itself using available tools) the
addresses to be deleted do not appear. One of you nice people
has promised to post in Bugzilla on it, because he's seen it
too. Apparently there is a "Collected Addresses" file, which
I haven't found.
Peter Potamus the Purple Hippo
> Apparently there is a "Collected Addresses" file, which
> I haven't found.
try history.mab
lyle
> Did you read Jamie's comments?
> Did you agree with them?
> If not why not?
Because I was able to decipher the TB Address Book File (said to be in
mork format) and, in a few hours, write VBA script that imported the
information it contained into Outlook. The TB Address Book format
seemed to me to be simple, efficient and straightforward.
Ice
Can i have this VBA script. I have some .mab files and need to extract
the addresses from them.