Shaarli Netscape Bookmark Parser

This library provides a decoder that is able of parsing Netscape bookmarks (as exported by common Web browsers and bookmarking services), and an encoder that is able to export data to bookmarks format., _(*2)

🚀 Installation

Using Composer (package):, _(*3)

$ composer require shaarli/netscape-bookmark-parser

🔥 Usage

Import from Bookmark file

<?php
// parse.php
require_once 'vendor/autoload.php';

use Shaarli\NetscapeBookmarkParser\NetscapeBookmarkParser;

$parser = new NetscapeBookmarkParser();
$bookmarks = $parser->parseFile('./tests/Fixtures/Encoder/input/netscape_basic.htm');
var_dump($bookmarks);

Above example will return following array:, _(*4)

array(2) {
  [0] => array(7) {
    ["name"] => string(12) "Secret stuff"
    ["image"] => NULL
    ["url"] => string(19) "https://private.tld"
    ["tags"] => array(2) {
      [0] => string(7) "private"
      [1] => string(6) "secret"
    }
    ["description"] => string(52) "Super-secret stuff you're not supposed to know about"
    ["dateCreated"] => int(971175336)
    ["public"] => bool(false)
  }
  [1] => array(7) {
    ["name"] => string(12) "Public stuff"
    ["image"] => NULL
    ["url"] => string(17) "http://public.tld"
    ["tags"] => array(3) {
      [0] => string(6) "public"
      [1] => string(5) "hello"
      [2] => string(5) "world"
    }
    ["description"] => NULL
    ["dateCreated"] => int(1456433748)
    ["public"] => bool(true)
  }
}

Export to file

<?php
// export.php
require_once 'vendor/autoload.php';

use Shaarli\NetscapeBookmarkParser\NetscapeBookmarkParser;

$data = [
    [
        'name'        => 'shaarli/Shaarli',
        'url'         => 'https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli',
        'image'       => 'data:image/png;base64, ...'
        'description' => 'The personal, minimalist, super-fast, database free, bookmarking service',
        'public'      => true,
        'tags'        => ['shaarli'],
    ],
    [
        'name'         => 'shaarli/netscape-bookmark-parser',
        'url'          => 'https://github.com/shaarli/netscape-bookmark-parser',
        'public'       => false,
        'dateCreated'  => '1612572000',
        'dateModified' => '1612572000',
        'tags'         => ['shaarli'],
    ],
];

$parser = new NetscapeBookmarkParser();

$parser->export($data, './export.htm');

Above example will write following string into file:, _(*5)

<!DOCTYPE NETSCAPE-Bookmark-file-1>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<TITLE>Bookmarks</TITLE>
<H1>Bookmarks</H1>
<DL><p>
<DT><H3>shaarli</H3>
<DL><p>
<DT><A HREF="https://github.com/shaarli/Shaarli" PRIVATE="0" ICON="data:image/png;base64, ...">shaarli/Shaarli</A>
<DD>The personal, minimalist, super-fast, database free, bookmarking service
<DT><A HREF="https://github.com/shaarli/netscape-bookmark-parser"> ADD_DATE="1612572000" LAST_MODIFIED="1612572000">shaarli/netscape-bookmark-parser</A>
<\DL><p>
<\DL><p>

💻 Dependencies

Shaarli Netscape Bookmark Parser requires the following dependencies:, _(*6)

PHP
Composer
Make (optional)

🐘 PHP

Learn how to install PHP from official documentation here, _(*7)

📦 Composer

Learn how to install Composer from official documentation here, _(*8)

🛠 Make

🐧 Install Make (Linux)

On linux machine enter following command, _(*9)

$ sudo apt-get install --assume-yes make

🏁 Install Make (Windows)

On windows machine you will need to install cygwin or GnuWin make first to execute make script., _(*10)

🍎 Install Make (OSX)

Make should be available by default on OSX system, but you can upgrade make version with following command, _(*11)

$ brew install make

📑 About

⚡ A word from Kafene

The motivations behind developing this parser are the following: - the Netscape format has a very loose specification: no DTD nor XSL stylesheet to constrain how data is formatted. - software and web services export bookmarks using a wild variety of attribute names and values. - using standard SAX or DOM parsers is thus not straightforward., _(*12)

How it works: - the input bookmark file is trimmed and sanitized to improve parsing results - the resulting data is then parsed using PCRE patterns to match attributes and values corresponding to the most likely: - attribute names: description vs. note, tags vs. labels, date vs. time, etc. - data formats: comma,separated,tags vs. space separated labels, UNIX epochs vs. human-readable dates, newlines & carriage returns, etc. - an associative array containing all successfully parsed links with their attributes is returned, _(*13)

⚡ Shaarli community fork

This friendly fork is maintained by the Shaarli community at https://github.com/shaarli/netscape-bookmark-parser and is used by the open-source Shaarli bookmarking service. This is a community fork of the original netscape-bookmark-parser project by Kafene., _(*14)