Firefox Bookmarks add_date

Question

One question to firefox exported bookmarks.

How to read this date: ADD_DATE="1375088003"? I think it is date when user add new website to bookmarks but how to read this all string? Where is year, day and month?

Answer 1

It's the Epoch time, ie the number of seconds since Jan 1 1970. To convert it to a human-friendly date, you can pass it through the 'date' unix command:

date -r 1375088003

will return

Mon 29 Jul 2013 18:53:23 AEST

(on my trusty Mac here in eastern Australia, hence the AEST)

Answer 2

Here's what I do. I export bookmarks from my browser. Assume the result file is called "bookmarks.html". I have a one-line executable script that takes a file as input, and creates another file with many long fields stripped. The one-liner I call "icon.sed" contains this:

sed 's/ICON=\"[^\"]*\"//' | sed 's/ICON_URI=\"[^\"]*\"//' | \
sed 's/LAST_CHARSET=\"[^\"]*\"//' | sed 's/HREF=\"[^\"]*\"//'| \
tr -s ' '

I use it like this:

~/icon.sed <bookmarks.html >newbook.txt

I have another script that takes a mm/dd/ccyy parameter, and returns the Epoch time for that date. That executable script is called "epoch.sh":

#!/bin/sh
if [ -z "$1" ]; then echo "You must supply a date"
else date -j -f "%m/%d/%Y" "$1" "+%s"; fi
exit 0

Choose a date you're looking for, and send it through "epoch.sh", such as: ~/epoch.sh 10/30/2015 which outputs this: 1446246082 .

You can then grep your newbook.txt file looking for either ADD_DATE or LAST_MODIFIED date which begins with the first four digits: 1446

grep 'LAST_MODIFIED="1446' newbook.txt

Also, use epoch.sh to get a pair of epoch times for start and stop dates so you can bracket your results by doing multiple greps over the range, using just the first four digits of each epoch time.

Answer 3

To convert a Firefox timestamp to a date with BASIC:
If the timestamp is from an sqlite dump of places.sqlite, you need to truncate it first:
   stg0 = Left("1670163289502000", 10) results in "1670163289"
Convert the timestamp:
 Dim var0 As double, var1 As Date
 var0 = stg0
    or
 var0 = "1670163289"   'BASIC will do the conversion for you
 var1 = (var0 / 86400) + 25569
where 86400 is the # of seconds in a day and 25569 is the BASIC daynumber for 1/1/1970