As of now I am publishing the updated code of the standalone version, which has partially been re-written in two ways: for one it now comprises of the same functionality as the online version, and for another the coding structure has been reorganized so I can keep the two versions in unison easier. This means that any update or change made to the software will be applied to both versions: the online version will make use of the update whereas the standalone version will be published open source under the same license with the updated code.

You can download the updated code here.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Let me quickly list the options which the new standalone version offers (i.e. the differences to the original publication), which are about user customizations:

• $OUTFILE_TYPE = “TXT”
  defines whether the type of the output should be in text (TXT) or comma-separated values (CSV). Please note that the file extension you define for $OUTFILE as part of the filename is not taken into consideration; so e.g. if you want to output a CSV file, setting the outfile name to “outfile.csv” is not enough, you need to specifically set $OUTFILE_TYPE to CSV.
• $NEWLINE = “\n”
  defines the format of the system dependent newline. Use \r\n on Windows and \n on Unix/Linux and Mac.
• default file opening mode is now “overwrite” ( $f_handle = fopen( $OUTFILE, “w” ); ). If you would like to append extracted text message to the output file rather than overwrite the file use “a” instead of “w“. Note that the line now moved towards the end of the file.
• Change format of output of single text messages
  In case of TXT you need to change $OUTSTRING .= “$time$senderror$NEWLINE$address$NEWLINE$text$NEWLINE$NEWLINE$NEWLINE”; to your liking and in case of CSV change $OUTSTRING .= “$address,$time,\”" . str_replace( “\”", “\”\”", $text) . “\”$NEWLINE”;.
  Make sure you only change the format string and leave the .= intact .

If you are a new user to this and don’t know what to do about the user specific CONFIGURATION section or how to run the script, please refer to the original blog post, which explains in detail how the standalone version works.

As always you can contact me with any remarks you would like to bring to my attention.

The online version continued development including security checks and the likes. Until I have more than 24h a day at my disposal, I will continue development on the online version only. The source code for the online version is not yet publicly available (it will be once I merge the two branches), but please do contact me if you’re interested.

The current blog post is about a small update that basically fixed the CSV format. Even though there is no “CSV standard” and a few different formats in common usage, I am refering to RFC 4180: enclosing text with double quotes and escaping double quotes with themselves.

Bottom line, feel free to use the updated online version of the free SMS extractor:

Click: SMS / text message extraction from iPhone

Because I’m currently having more fun to do some programming in PHP than to rewrite the original script in Java (most people will have a JVM and/or JRE installed), I created a new webpage that uses the original script.

Click: SMS / text message extraction from iPhone

The usage is simple: select the SQLite database file, make customizations if desired (otherwise default values will be used) and click “Extract”. You might have to wait a little while depending on the size of your storage file. After the file has been (automatically) uploaded and messages have been extracted, you will be offered a download prompt for the result file.
See the above page for further details.

Compared to other online solutions out there, this version (as well as the original script) has more ways of tailoring the output to your own needs and the usage is utterly free. However, so far you cannot yet change the arrangement of phone number, date and message in the new online version; if you want to do that, you will still have to use the original work (which was released under CC BY 3.0).

Please leave comments about the usage into this blog post, so I can improve the page and script if necessary.

Cheers

UPDATE (21/11/2011): Correct CSV export was added.

UPDATE (05/01/2012): Now supports iOS 5 container.

For a while I’ve been checking out various programs for extracting and converting text messages from the iPhone SMS storage SQLite database. For some reason they seem to be either for purchase or not doing their job well.
When I found out that all they are doing is pretty much just some simple SQL query and putting the result into various output formats, I decided to quickly write this myself, while keeping it simple and open.

Download

The choice of a programming language wasn’t easy taking into account that most iPhone users will be on Windows and the extractor should not require major alterations to the system (and doing that without the solution itself being bloated).
Even though the task can be easily done in various languages such as Perl, Python, PHP, C/C++ or Java, I decided to use PHP, because the program can stay very simple and can run with a minimal version of PHP. In addition many users with a Unix/Linux machine available will have PHP installed anyway and can also easily use the program.
That being said we can move on to the program details. The PHP script needs the iPhone SMS storage SQLite database file as input and will then convert all text messages and append them to a file in a certain format.
So far the script is configurable to a certain extent. Naturally the name of the input and output file can be modified. Furthermore you can decide whether you want to extract just incoming or outgoing texts or all of them. Last but not least a date range can be given, from which to extract the messages. See further down (or code) for details about customization.
At this point in time, it is not (yet) possible to limit extraction to a single contact. Even though it might be a common use case for many users, however the format of recipient/sender may vary (at least in my storage file), so it might be hard to determine which number formats are from the same contact.

The usage of the extractor is as follows:

1. First you will need the SMS storage container file (it is usually named 3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28 and can be found in the iTunes backup folder, which can be found e.g. on Windows7 in C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\[hexstring] or get it directly from your iPhone: /var/mobile/Library/SMS/sms.db )
2. If you’re on Unix/Linux, make sure you have PHP5 (along with libs for sqlite) installed. If you’re on Windows, you can either use the official PHP installer [alternative: http://windows.php.net/download/] (just run the installer) or use my minimized packaged version of PHP (just unpack to a location of your desire)
3. Download the SMS Extractor for iPhone (extract_sms.php_.txt), rename it to extract_sms.php and use a text editor of your desire to make configuration changes (see below and/or follow the instructions and explanations in the code)
4. If you used the PHP installer, navigate to the folder containing extract_sms.php and double-click on it (make sure you placed the SMS storage container file in the same directory and modified the input configuration)
5. If you used my minimized version, place extract_sms.php in the same folder you unpacked the PHP archive; use Start, Run…, “cmd.exe” and navigate to the correct folder / if you’re on Unix/Linux, navigate to the folder you downloaded extract_sms.php)
6. (make sure you placed the SMS storage container file in the same directory and modified the input configuration) then run the script typing “php extract_sms.php”
7. Unless you changed the output file, you will find a file “sms.txt” in the same folder

Possible customization can be done in the following ways (look for “user specific CONFIGURATION” in extract_sms.php ):

• $DATABASE = “sms.db”
  change this to the appropriate filename if your SMS storage container file is named differently
• $TIME_FORMAT = “d.m.Y H:i:s”
  the internal text message timestamp is the number of seconds since Unix Epoch, so in order to make this human readable, provide the time format of your desire (see http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.date.php for details)
• $FILTER = “ALL”
  set here whether you would like to limit extraction to only incoming text messages (“IN“), or only outgoing messages (“OUT“) or no limit (“ALL“)
• $OUTFILE = “./sms.txt”
  name for the output file, you can change this to any name with or without file extension
• date_default_timezone_set(‘Europe/Berlin’)
  if you want to use a time range (see next item), you need to specify your timezone (which supposedly equals the timezone your text messages got timestamped). See http://www.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php for available timezones
• $RANGE_BEGIN = mktime( 22, 45, 00, 11, 9, 2009 ) and/or $RANGE_END = mktime( 22, 55, 00, 11, 9, 2009 )
  if you want to use a time range, you can configure either a start or an end of range or even both. The order of comma separated digits in parentheses is: hour, min, sec, mon, day, year. Also, you need to uncomment (i.e. remove the leading //) the line of the variable(s) you want to use
• Replace file instead of appending ( $f_handle = fopen( $OUTFILE, “a” ); )
  the default behavior is to open the output file in append mode in order to avoid accidental overwrite. If you would like replace the output file instead of appending the extracted text messages, put “w” instead of “a“
• Change output format ( fwrite( $f_handle, “$time$senderror\n$address\n$text\n\n\n” ); )
  if you would like to change the format in which the script is putting your extracted text message information, you will need to change this line appropriately. However, I cannot provide a manual how to change it to your liking at this moment; you will either know what you’re doing or have to google and trial ‘n error

Please feel free to comment about the usage or drop me an email at blog {at} haraldkraft(.)de. It’s fine with me to continue development and add new (simple) features, and definitely fix bugs I might have there in PHP; just let me know .

Also, please do use my script for your adaptions; I am releasing this under CC.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

I’ve pretty much tried every instruction that’s out there which has anything to do with enabling mobile internet. Removing SIM-card, resetting APN (even though my provider doesn’t even need any APN settings), completely resetting network settings – along with disabling+enabling mobile data connections and/+ 3G for a thousand times. The “E” or the “3G” was showing up fine (depending which one I enabled), nevertheless, no connection could be made from any app.

Then I remembered something from previous days: I was using SBsettings along with toggles (one for EDGE, one for 3G), and I usually enabled or disabled both of them at the same time. Enabled them when I needed mobile internet, disabled them in order to save battery. So, depending on whether 3G was available, the bar was showing “3G” or just “E” – however, it was also still showing “E” even when I disabled both 3G and EDGE via toggles. I.e., an “E” was showing, but there was no connection – any app would confirm no connection. Furthermore, if I had EDGE disabled via toggle, I could enable 3G – and get a shiny “3G” – but still no connection possible.

So, the fact that if – in the current state with iOS4 – I disabled mobile data connections and there showing no “E” at all, made me presume that in earlier days my “mobile data connections” was always enabled and I was just switching EDGE and/+ 3G on and off. This could also mean – with remembrance of the “E” always showing in earlier days – that when I enabled mobile data connection now, I could enable 3G all I wanted, there would be no connection if EDGE was disabled (which I couldn’t enable, since I’m on iOS4 without toggles).

On order to prove or test this, I had to find a way to enable EDGE without the availability of a jailbreak and therefore with a lack of toggles. My dear friend Andre (special thx again) had a diff run on his iTunes MobileSync backup – once with EDGE enabled and once with EDGE disabled via toggle. He came to the following result:

In the backup file d67ab43d1c47dd60d7cf3a7a3939775f6938a8ef.mddata (3.x) or 8218978e4ab0a48035bb92653145a6be872ea858 (4.0) you will find the following excerpt (note the “ip1“):

<string>com.apple.CommCenter (ip1)</string>
<key>com.apple.CommCenter</key>
<dict>
<key>AllowNetworkAccess</key>
<integer>1</integer>
<key>Available</key>
<integer>1</integer>

The integer following the Available-node switches between 1 (EDGE toggle on) and 0 (EDGE toggle off). That basically meant, that for enabling EDGE without a toggle, I had to alter this value and get it back into my iPhone.

Simple way to do it:

1. Backup/Sync iPhone
2. Restore iPhone
3. manually edit the above file (depending on your OS version) in the current backup folder
4. Recover iPhone with the backup you created and edited

That’s it – it worked for me. EDGE seems to be enabled, and I can use the OS switches for data connection and 3G as I like, they work, as well, as expected+desired.

Hope this helps.