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waffffffle · Jun 10, 2002, 03:16 PM

I want to write some sort of program that will integrate my old AIM logs from the OS 9 AIM client (the OS X one doesn't log) with Adium. The two programs use different formats for logging but Adium offers a very nice log browser and search feature but I would really like to be able to access my old AIM logs from Adium.

Adium stores its logs in folders, one for each screen name. Within each folder is a text file that contains the conversation for each day.

AIM on the other hand has one file for each buddy (which can get quite large). Each file contains every conversation that you have had with that buddy. The conversations are separated by two returns. Also before each conversation is the date and time of that conversation.

Also Adium displays the time stamp differently than AIM. In Adium logs the timestamp is before the buddy's name, and it's in 24hour time and shows seconds. AIM logs show the time stamp after the screen name (I believe only if you have time stamp turned on in the AIM prefs) and it's in AM/PM and does not show seconds.

So what I'm asking is how I should go about making this program. My programming knowledge is basically C and some AppleScript. I really don't know any shell scripting or Perl or anything like that (which may be the best way to do this). Since I'm dealing with only text files I imagine that C wouldn't be out of the question, but there may be a better way.

Any ideas?

Mactoid · Jun 10, 2002, 07:37 PM

c is never out of the question <img border="0" title="" alt="[Wink]" src="wink.gif" />

But like you said, it's probably not the easiest way to go for this one. I'm sure that there is a large contingent that would immediately recommend Perl for this. I imagine it would be very good in this case, but my experience with it is very limited, so I can't say for sure.

It's probably not as good, but I have more experience with awk, and I think it wouldn't be too bad for this.

You probably ought to go ahead and try perl. I've learned it about a 1/2 dozen times in the past (I always forget it again after I'm done with whatever i needed it for), and although it has some quirks (i hate the way argument passing works), it's fairly easy to pick up.

BTW, you will post your code when you finish it, right

I was thinking of doing something similar, but never go the motivation to do it. It looks like you on the other hand have mustered up the motivation to do it, so I'd love to see the results!

waffffffle · Jun 10, 2002, 11:43 PM

Unfortunately both Perl and awk are two things that I do not know. This seems like it could get quite hairy in C. I really don't want to spend all that much time trying to learn Perl just to do this one task, especially since I'm supposed to be learning obj-c this summer.

Mactoid · Jun 11, 2002, 02:21 AM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by waffffffle:
Unfortunately both Perl and awk are two things that I do not know. This seems like it could get quite hairy in C. I really don't want to spend all that much time trying to learn Perl just to do this one task, especially since I'm supposed to be learning obj-c this summer.<hr /></blockquote>Yeah, would defiantly get hairy in c, I was not seriously recommending that at all. Since you are trying to learn Obj-C, you could always try and do this in Obj-C, right? Kill two birds with one stone in that case.

However, since you've coded in C before, I'm sure you could pick up either Perl or Awk in a very short amount of time. I had to teach myself Awk last summer for a project, and I got a firm grasp on the language in under an hour, with only the O'Reilly Unix in a Nutshell book as my guide.

And for Perl, if you want to learn that, try <a href="http://www.perl.com/pub/q/documentation" target="_blank">here</a>. Just go over the basics, and learn stuff as you need it. After about 10 minutes of looking over the basics you can be started on your code.

Good luck.