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  4. Bookmark file format?

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Bookmark file format?

  • Is the bookmark file format documented anywhere? I have two problems. First, Opera 26 doesn't import my current bookmarks (from 11.62 or so). If I knew the format, instead of just guessing, I could probably write a usable translator quite easily.

    Second, when I look at the Bookmarks file for Opera 26 (Linux version), I see that bookmarks have a "meta_info" section, with image data, type, &c fields. If I remove this, can I get a plain text bookmarks list, instead of the (incomprehensible to me) set of minature images of whatever page I happened to bookmark?

    And is there any way to change the behavior so the new Opera automatically does bookmarks as a list of text, not as pictures?

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  • Moderator

    It is a standard database format, same as Chrome.

    The bookmark manager? Would be nice - I hate those huge tiles and would prefer a nice list myself. But no, as far as I know you can't. You can switch it yourself in each folder and it remembers for that folder, but you have to switch all of them yourself. That doesn't make it a default behavior.

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  • I'm puzzled by "standard database format": though it's not my field, I didn't think there was such a thing. Indeed, it looks rather like JSON format to me - not that I'm any sort of expert on that, either.

    In any case, I was really asking if there's documentation on what all the field names mean & what possible values are. As for instance, there are date fields that are a long number not having any obvious relation to a date, a checksum for the whole file, etc.

    If I knew the meanings it would be trivial to write a parser that would convert my existing bookmark file, or another to run as a post-processor to strip out image crap and set text as default. But I'd really like to eliminate the amount of trial & error needed 🙂

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  • Moderator

    You may try to find some info here.

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  • Moderator

    There was a post nearly a year ago now where a user was using a database plugin for Firefox to read the Opera Favorites file - silly as that sounds. I don't know the details on the actual file format, but Opera didn't reinvent the wheel here - the format is the same as Chrome uses, and a few Opera users actually used Chrome to import their bookmarks from other browsers and then copied the files to Opera (before Opera got its own import option). I've never studied it myself, but I'm sure if you want to be able to read the file yourself the information for Chrome will be easily available.

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