Thursday, December 10, 2020

Konverting Kopete chat history to libpurple (Pidgin)

When I recently migrated from KDE4 to KDE5 (yes, Slackware did that update just a few days ago ;-)) I had to discover that no migration was done for my Kopete profile. And not only that, I suddenly had to suffer from various display errors - which had happened a few years ago already, but I forgot the solution to fix this. To make things short: I decided to finally migrate to Pidgin.

Now of course I didn’t want to loose all my chat history, but import it into Pidgin.

Fortunately Kopete is storing the log files as plain XML files, though very strange ones - who thought it was a good idea to safe something like “11 9:5:0” as a time field? Also guessing what that is supposed to say? That’s nine o’ clock and five minutes on the eleventh day of a month. Which month you ask? That’s stored in a dedicated field of course ;-)
Anyway: I’ve just written an XSLT converter again. This time it will also include a small Bash script wrapper for creating the correct directories.

Note that it will only convert Jabber and ICQ out of the box - those were the only protocols I’ve been using with Kopete. It should be trivial to add other protocols though - basically you’ll just have to find out the correct source and target directory names.

The script including a small README file can be found on https://gitlab.com/laenion/kopete2purplelog.