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Bookmark merger for Mozilla Firefox

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4.00/5 (3 votes)

Nov 29, 2006

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Merge bookmarks from several files in Firefox format.

Sample Image

Introduction

I could not find a simple tool to keep my Firefox bookmarks from work synchronized with my bookmarks at home, so I finally decided to write some code myself.

The code does not do (too) much, it solves the problem to some extend though: the program reads the "boookmarks.html" file from Firefox and treats it like a set of nodes.

Using the code

Just start the solution in VS2005 or another appropriate tool, the main engine can be found in the merge loop in MozillaLinkMerger.cs. Identify the file you want to use as the master file and some slave files you wish to merge into the master file. Don't worry, the original master file is saved in a different name (some GUID).

public void Merge()
{
    if (Stopped)
        return;

    //operation 1, read and parse master file
    string[] masterFileLines = 
       System.IO.File.ReadAllLines(_masterLinksFilePath);
    MozillaFile masterFile = new MozillaFile(masterFileLines);
    IncrementProgress();
    if (Stopped)
        return;

    //operation 2 - x, for each slave file read and parse links
    //run through each slave file
    foreach (string slaveFile in _slaveFiles)
    {
        string[] slaveFileLines = 
                 System.IO.File.ReadAllLines(slaveFile);
        MozillaFile slave = new MozillaFile(slaveFileLines);

        masterFile.Merge(slave);

        this.TotalNumberOfNewLinksFound = 
             masterFile.NumberOfNewLinksFound;

        IncrementProgress();
        if (Stopped)
            return;
    }
    if (RemoveDuplicates)
    {
        masterFile.RemoveDuplicateLinks();
    }

    //finally operation x + 1, print file to disk
    masterFile.Save(_mergedLinksFilepath);

    _isDone = true;
    IncrementProgress();
}

Points of Interest

Well, I did try to keep it simple.. If you are familiar with regular expressions, you may find better ways to identify links and folders in Firefox-bookmarks. I don't tend to write that many comments, so hopefully the code will be somewhat self-explaining.