NAME

File::Mork - a module to read Mozilla URL history files

SYNOPSIS

    my $mork = File::Mork->new($filename, verbose => 1) 
        || die $File::Mork::ERROR."\n";
    foreach my $entry ($mork->entries) {
        while (my($key,$val) = each %$entry) {
            printf ("%14s = %s\n", $key, $val);
        }
    }

DESCRIPTION

This is a module that can read the Mozilla URL history file -- normally $HOME/.mozilla/default/*.slt/history.dat -- and extract the id, url, name, hostname, first visted dat, last visited date and visit count.

To find your history file it might be worth using Mozilla::Backup which has some platform-independent code for finding the profiles of various Mozilla-isms (including Firefox, Camino, K-Meleon, etc.).

METHODS

THE UGLY TRUTH LAID BARE

Extracted from mork.pl

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.

AUTHOR

Module-ised by Simon Wistow <simon@thegestalt.org>

based on

    http://www.jwz.org/hacks/mork.pl

Created: 3-Mar-2004 by Jamie Zawinski, Anonymous, and Jacob Post.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright © 2004 Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>

LICENSE

Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute, and sell this software and its documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation. No representations are made about the suitability of this software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.

BUGS

Might be a bit memory heavy? Could do with an iterator interface.

Can't write Mork dbs.

SEE ALSO

http://www.livejournal.com/users/jwz/312657.html

http://www.erys.org/resume/netscape/mork/jwz.html

NAME

File::Mork::Entry - an single entry in a mork DB

METHODS

All methods except "new" take an optional argument to set them.

POD ERRORS

Hey! The above document had some coding errors, which are explained below:

Around line 490:

Non-ASCII character seen before =encoding in '©'. Assuming CP1252