firefox formhistory.dat / editing it
LC's No-Spam Newsreading account
months. Now the "saved form information" (i.e. what is stored in
formhistory.dat) has grown very large and I want to SELECTIVELY edit it.
However, unlike e.g. the saved passwords, there is no facility to do
that apart from :
- clearing the ENTIRE saved form information, or
- going into each possible form, into all possible text areas,
clicking with the mouse to cause the list of items to appear,
and repeatedly doing shift-delete
what I'd want is a list of pages, with the list of form fields and
values applicable to it, so that I could do a selective deletion.
All the info should be in formhistory.dat, but this files looks somehow
encrypted.
What I'd like to have is either :
- a tool (running on Linux) to do the selective editing of
formhistory.dat
- the documentation of the layout and content of formhistory.dat
I've been unable to find it on the web or on the usenet.
Any hint gratefully acknowledged.
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Matt Nordhoff
> I'm using firefox (the version bundled with Linux SuSE 9.2) since a few
> months. Now the "saved form information" (i.e. what is stored in
> formhistory.dat) has grown very large and I want to SELECTIVELY edit it.
>
> However, unlike e.g. the saved passwords, there is no facility to do
> that apart from :
>
> - clearing the ENTIRE saved form information, or
> - going into each possible form, into all possible text areas,
> clicking with the mouse to cause the list of items to appear,
> and repeatedly doing shift-delete
>
> what I'd want is a list of pages, with the list of form fields and
> values applicable to it, so that I could do a selective deletion.
>
> All the info should be in formhistory.dat, but this files looks somehow
> encrypted.
>
> What I'd like to have is either :
>
> - a tool (running on Linux) to do the selective editing of
> formhistory.dat
> - the documentation of the layout and content of formhistory.dat
>
>
> I've been unable to find it on the web or on the usenet.
> Any hint gratefully acknowledged.
formhistory.dat isn't encrypted, it just uses a completely insane,
brain-damaged idiotic format called Mork that nobody can believe is
still in use by Mozilla, but that nobody has bothered to replace*.
I dunno. Unless it's like 5 MiB, I don't see the problem. If you really
want it to be smaller, you could empty it. I have lots of problems with
it (it's only written out on shutdown, so if Firefox crashes, changes
are lost, and it isn't even always written out then), and have been
deleting it frequently, and it's really not much of an inconvenience.
Not that I want to lose it, but I don't mind so much.
Anyway, here are some Mork-related links (I have a folder in my
bookmarks devoted to it ;-) ):
<URL:http://bjf.id.au/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/software/20050429-mork.html>
<URL:http://blakeross.com/index.php?p=168>
<URL:https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=241438>
<URL:http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/db/mork/>
<URL:http://www.erys.org/resume/netscape/mork/mork.html>
<URL:http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html>
<URL:http://www.livejournal.com/users/jwz/312657.html>
<URL:http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/arch/mork/grammar.txt>
<URL:http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/arch/mork/primer.txt>
* They're working on replacing Mork and some of the other formats used
with SQLite databases:
<URL:http://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla2:Unified_Storage>
(Followup-To n.p.m.browser. Please don't cross-post unnecessarily...)
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