ichat

A Deno module for parsing macOS *.ichat archives.

Status

This module is just a prototype, reversed engineered with the help of the deno.land/x/bplist_parser module. Further, this has only been anecdotally tested using ichat files from my machine. There’s probably some bugs I haven’t caught. Please report them if you find them.

Examples

// You should @version this import
import { parseBuffer } from "https://deno.land/x/ichat/mod.ts";

const file = await Deno.readFile("./path/to/file.ichat");
const ichat = parseBuffer(file);

Command line

To parse ichat archives from the command line, you can deno install the bin/ichat_json.ts script:

deno install --allow-read --allow-write https://deno.land/x/ichat/bin/ichat_json.ts

This will install the script as the ichat_json command. The name of the installed command can be customized with the --name/-n flag. See deno install --help for more info.

Usage

The following will extract messages from ./messages.ichat and print the output JSON to the command line. Message attachments will be ignored.

ichat_json messages.ichat

The following will store the messages into ./messages.json with attachments saved to the ./attachments folder.

ichat_json messages.ichat -o messages.json -a attachments

See ichat_json --help for more usage information.

Contributing

Contributions of any kind are welcome, just open a GitHub issue.

I’m currently looking for data-rich, well-known ichat archives to use as test data. If you have some you’re willing to provide or know of some on the internet somewhere, please let me know.