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Subject: Re: Thunderbird - msg#00105List: lang.perl.macosxOn 2004.9.24, at 11:34 AM, Chris Devers wrote: On Fri, 24 Sep 2004, Joel Rees wrote: I don't know about .vcf, but .csv is fairly easy to just look at with a text editor (formatting off, of course). VCF is (basically) an ascii format. You can encode binary data (e.g. photos) in it, but it's base64 encoded (just like email) so you can poke at it with a regular text editor. A typical entry might look something like this: BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Meyer;Russ;;; FN:Russ Meyer EMAIL;type=INTERNET;type=HOME;type=pref:rmeyer@xxxxxxx item1.EMAIL;type=INTERNET:rmeyer@xxxxxxx item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<Other>!$_ TEL;type=HOME;type=pref:800 555.1212 item2.ADR;type=HOME;type=pref:;;42 Any Lane \n;Hollywood;CA;12345;United States item2.X-ABADR:us X-AIM;type=HOME;type=pref:rmvix END:VCARD Now that you mention it, I guess I have looked at those with a text editor. Etc. It's a little confusing, Not so much confusing as just got a lot of stuff in it. Looks like colons for the element labels and semicolons for the element delimiters. And I think I see a buried newline escaped with a backslash. Hmm. Who made this format up, anyway? My goodness, these things have got RFCs behind them: http://www.imc.org/pdi/ Surprised they don't mention any movement to convert these to XML. but it's mostly a regular format that isn't too hard to read or otherwise work with. Well, ... (One of these days, we have to put ASCII behind us, but that's a topic for a rainy weekend or two.) ??? Every tool has a role; ascii has lots and lots and lots of useful ones. Also roles that it's totally wrong for, but that doesn't mean that it makes sense to get rid of it altogether... Yeah, but it's time to move on. (I'm busy in my spare time trying to invent an encoding scheme that includes a variety of meta-punctuation, including meta-field separators. Of course, by this point, I'm duplicating effort by the Unicode consortium, to a certain extent.) -- Joel Rees Thread at a glance:
Previous Message by Date: click to view message previewRe: ThunderbirdOn Thu, 23 Sep 2004, wren argetlahm wrote: > Incidentally, the .vcf file generated by AB looks akin > to your example but with a space between every > charecter and two newlines instead of one. Is that > normal, or might that be part of the reason that > Firebird is having difficulty reading it? It looks like it's using DOS line endings: \r\n That may be required by the spec, I don't know... -- Chris Devers Next Message by Date: click to view message previewRe: Thunderbird--- Joel Rees <joel_rees@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Incidentally, the .vcf file generated by AB looks > akin > > to your example but with a space between every > > charecter and two newlines instead of one. Is that > > normal, or might that be part of the reason that > > Firebird is having difficulty reading it? > > I would guess that would be the entire reason. Use > the file open menu > item in Text Edit and try loading the .vcf file > generated by Address > Book as a Unicode UTF-16 file. (You may need to > customize the encoding > list.) Turns out that that was in fact (one of) the problem(s). Also turns out that Firebird does not in fact support vCard format. (The import function is reading each line in as a sperate entry ala .csv.) > > If you just double click or drag-and-drop, it will > use the default > encoding, which is probably UTF-8. >From what I've tried, you can't drag groups out of AddressBook. Dragging individuals (singlely or multiplely) leads to the same behaviour as the export function. And the default encoding for most things on OSX appears to be UTF-16 rather than the more prevalent UTF-8. Thanks, now to figure out how to get the .csv AppleScript to work... ~wren __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail Previous Message by Thread: click to view message previewRe: ThunderbirdOn Thu, 23 Sep 2004, wren argetlahm wrote: > Incidentally, the .vcf file generated by AB looks akin > to your example but with a space between every > charecter and two newlines instead of one. Is that > normal, or might that be part of the reason that > Firebird is having difficulty reading it? It looks like it's using DOS line endings: \r\n That may be required by the spec, I don't know... -- Chris Devers Next Message by Thread: click to view message previewRe: ThunderbirdOn Tue, 21 Sep 2004, wren argetlahm wrote: > Any other suggestions? It may not be the smallest solution, but Palm Desktop may be an effective intermediary. The program is a free download, and among other things it can able to import & export several address file formats. -- Chris Devers Loading Comments...
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