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Free iPhone text message extractor works with iOS 6

Life and People, Technical No Responses »

Oct 042012

Actually, the updated version of the SMS extractor for iPhone was already rolled out on September 25th, but I haven’t gotten around to blogging about this, so here goes.

Apple made a lot of changes to the SQLite container (especially field names and references) so I also had to apply a few changes to the extraction software. Unfortunately it is on a path of getting cluttered because there are many special cases. However atm I don’t have the time and motivation to turn this into a very clean program. For the time being it’s doing its job: extracting every single text message for free :).

XML support for free iPhone SMS extractor

Life and People, Technical No Responses »

Aug 152012

Even though this piece of software is doing a good job, it got a little rusty and features needed to be added. Also I had to do some small fixes.

The SMS extractor is now able to output the extracted text messages into an XML formatted file. The following example will show the format that is being used:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>

<messages>
	<message type="SMS">
		<address>0123 45678910</address>
		<time>09.05.2012 20:09:19</time>
		<text>This is an example text message.</text>
	</message>
	<message type="iMessage">
		<address>+49 123 45678910</address>
		<time>06.08.2012 18:54:17</time>
		<text>This is an example iMessage.</text>
	</message>
</messages>

<?xml version="1.0" ?>

<text>This is an example text message.</text>

</message>

<text>This is an example iMessage.</text>

</message>

</messages>

SMS extractor for iPhone now supports iMessages correctly

General, Life and People No Responses »

Mar 132012

It took me a while until I would finally face the issue about iMessages (and their date). The latest released version of the SMS extractor was able to deal with iOS 5 containers and would already also extract iMessages – however with a wrong date.

In order to fix this, I had to treat iMessages as a special case. Thing is, in order to still be able and deal with container files prior to iOS 5 (and the program stay universal), the fact whether iMessages can appear needs to be determined before the actual message retrieval is done. So far I’ve been too lazy to approach this issue, that’s why it took a while. (And yes, I hate legacy support, but I hate it even more when users are left out who don’t or can’t update for some reason!)

Updated and unified version of standalone SMS extractor for iPhone

Life and People, Technical No Responses »

Jan 052012

Last year I released a script written in PHP which was able to extract text messages from the iPhone (more specifically: from the SQLite storage container) into a simple TXT file, which was documented in this blog post. The software required a PHP interpreter, which had to be cared for by the user (check the blog post for details), but was published under CC BY 3.0 so the user could make any alteration he desired or deemed necessary.
Some time later I wrote an online version of the extractor (release blog post), which offered extended functionality and above all no longer needed the user to run the interpreter him- or herself.
However, due to the lack of time I couldn’t keep the standalone version up to date with the online version and so they diverged.

Correct CSV export for free iPhone SMS extractor

Life and People, Technical 2 Responses »

Nov 212011

About half a year ago I published a PHP script that could extract text messages from an iPhone SQLite container. It was followed by an online version (blog post) a few weeks later, which was a website offering to use the original PHP script for text message extraction without having to install and/or run a webserver.

Free SMS Extractor for iPhone (written in PHP) – online version

Life and People, Technical No Responses »

Jun 102011

A few weeks ago I created a small PHP script that could extract text messages from an iPhone SQLite storage file. It required the user to have a PHP interpreter ready in order to run the script, which might be an obstacle keeping him or her from using the script.

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.

SMS Extractor for iPhone (written in PHP)

Life and People, Technical No Responses »

May 112011

UPDATE (10/06/2011): I started an online version of the script, see new blog post.

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.