MSN Conversation History Conversion

fuyutsuki · Post by **fuyutsuki** » Sat Jan 07, 2006 1:19 am

I've just tried Adium and I love it. Very nice program, and great customisations.

I want to change over to it from MSN for OSX but I need to solve one problem...

I save all my conversations and often use the archive for source material in forums and other group activities. Can I import my MSN archive into Adium? Is there a converter to allow this? If so then I'll be greatly pleased!

Messenger's conversation history search stinks. But I've a couple of years of good arguments and stuff in there which would really work better in Adium.

Thanks for the app!

kirk · Post by **kirk** » Sat Jan 07, 2006 2:00 am

You could put the HTML files into the directory where the logs are, I'm not sure if that will work or not though.

fuyutsuki · Post by **fuyutsuki** » Sat Jan 07, 2006 2:42 am

kirk wrote:You could put the HTML files into the directory where the logs are, I'm not sure if that will work or not though.

The MSN files are named things like "1/5/06@0" with no extension, but comparing them with Adium logs in TextEdit shows some similarity. They're not an identical layout, but I may be able to get a friend to convert this with AppleScript...

DragonQueen · Post by **DragonQueen** » Sat Jan 07, 2006 4:23 am

Something like that would be helpful for me, too... Though I was also wondering if there was a way you could import individual MSN conversation files onto Adium...?

fuyutsuki · Post by **fuyutsuki** » Sat Jan 07, 2006 12:57 pm

DragonQueen wrote:Something like that would be helpful for me, too... Though I was also wondering if there was a way you could import individual MSN conversation files onto Adium...?

They appear to be similar formats. I'll see if I can pester my coder friend into a quick script or something which allows drag and drop conversion. If he does do it, I'll put a link to it on the forum. 8)

kirk · Post by **kirk** » Sat Jan 07, 2006 2:46 pm

If I were you, (assuming they're both HTML documents) I'd just compare the structure of one saved MSN log and one Adium log, then just make some sort of Automator workflow to change all the MSN ones.

twopeak · Post by **twopeak** » Sat Jan 07, 2006 5:39 pm

you might try to make a copy of one log, add the .html file extension, put it where adium logs belong (home/Library/Application support/Adium2.0/somewhere) and see what adium makes of it...

If so, it will be fairly easy to do with an automator thingie or an applescript.

DragonQueen · Post by **DragonQueen** » Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:40 am

Well, it works to some extent. If you drag the conversation (saved as a web page) to Home/...Adium 2.0/Users/Default/Logs/[MSN.AccountScreenName], then the person you're having the conversation with shows up in the log window, but the conversation doesn't.

It's an improvement over before... ^_^

EDIT: ...From there, it needs to go into a folder with the other person's account name. The conversation doesn't format itself, though, just leaves it with all of the HTML tags showing. Now you can see the conversation, though.

fuyutsuki · Post by **fuyutsuki** » Wed Jan 11, 2006 10:25 pm

The full conversion AppleScript is almost ready. He's mostly got it working. I'll make sure it put it up on Adium Xtras once it's release ready.

fuyutsuki · Post by **fuyutsuki** » Sat Jan 14, 2006 6:44 pm

Finished. Version 1.0 can be found here:

http://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=x ... ra_id=2390

It's not fast, but it works!

DragonQueen · Post by **DragonQueen** » Mon Jan 16, 2006 6:31 am

Most excellent and very useful. ^_^ Thank you! *applauds*

yelly · Post by **yelly** » Mon Jan 16, 2006 2:27 pm

Great script, just one problem, no multilingual support...

fuyutsuki · Post by **fuyutsuki** » Mon Jan 16, 2006 9:47 pm

yelly wrote:Great script, just one problem, no multilingual support...

That has to do with the weird format MSN is using to encode its logs. I got him to comment on that on the script's page at adiumxtras. If someone can work out a fix, he'll try it out.

fuyutsuki · Post by **fuyutsuki** » Tue Jan 17, 2006 1:31 pm

New in Version 1.1:
- Implemented Unicode character set conversion (from UCS-2 to UTF-8), so should work with all
languages. This hasn't yet been verified, so feedback would be appreciated.

New in Version 1.2:
- Discovered (with actual test data - yes, I tested my code...) that Adium's log files don't use UTF-8;
They are regular ASCII. International characters are represented by HTML entities. This version
now does that conversion instead, and my test data shows up correctly in Adium's log viewer.

Check it out.

Argent · Post by **Argent** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 5:39 pm

Nice!
Is there a Tool that converts a Fire message history to be used in Adium?
A friend of mine want's to switch to adium, but doesn't want to lose his log. Help, anyone?