Exporting Bookmarks to Clean HTML

Lost User 133863 · February 14th, 2006, 2:41 pm

I'd like to export my Firefox bookmarks to HTML. The bookmarks.html file is currently at 2mb due to all the propriety code and I found no way of automatically removing that code.
Is there any extension or feature to export my bookmarks in that way, or rather to clean the bookmarks.html file?

Thank you

JaredM · Post by **JaredM** » February 14th, 2006, 3:00 pm

It's not because of the proprietary code, it's more likely you simply have a lot of bookmarks with custom favicons. I don't know how to prevent the favicon from being stored, but I think the max size of each favicon is like 16kb.

Lost User 133863 · February 14th, 2006, 3:02 pm

Favicons or no - I can't really post my bookmarks online as HTML as long as it'll make the page load slower than the collapse of flan left in a cupboard.

JaredM · Post by **JaredM** » February 14th, 2006, 3:08 pm

Remove all the attributes in the "a" element except the href attribute.

and change:

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<!DOCTYPE NETSCAPE-Bookmark-file-1>
<!-- This is an automatically generated file.
     It will be read and overwritten.
     DO NOT EDIT! -->
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<TITLE>Bookmarks</TITLE>

to

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<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
   <title>Bookmarks</title>
</head>
<body>

and at the very end add:

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</body>
</html>

Lost User 133863 · February 14th, 2006, 3:47 pm

Thank you, Jinexile, but that much I know for myself. The tricky part is how to remove all attributes within the anchor tag _not manually_ (when you've got hundreds of bookmarks, manually means painstakingly).

wong888 · Post by **wong888** » February 14th, 2006, 3:54 pm

try AM-DeadLink.

scratch · Post by **scratch** » February 14th, 2006, 3:56 pm

use the "delete icons" extension.

JaredM · Post by **JaredM** » February 14th, 2006, 4:02 pm

Use a RegEx find/replace, most modern text editors have this functionality.

Lost User 133863 · February 14th, 2006, 4:03 pm

I couldn't find the 'delete icons' extension on addons.mozilla.org - could you've written the wrong name?

Lost User 133863 · February 14th, 2006, 4:07 pm

Jinexile - I don't know how to use RegEx, sorry. If you could write it down for me I'd appreciate it tho.

Wong888 - AM-DeadLink is useful, but I can't see how is it useful in this case.

logan · Post by **logan** » February 14th, 2006, 4:50 pm

Code: Select all

        <DT><A HREF="http://www.mozilla.com/products/firefox/central.html" ICON="data:image/png;base64,..." LAST_CHARSET="ISO-8859-1" ID="rdf:#$GvPhC3">Getting Started</A>

easily accomplished with perl:

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while(<>) {
    s/ICON="[^\"]*" //;
    print;
}

or with vi(m):

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:g/ICON="[^\"]*" /s///g

http://www.gozer.org/mozilla/extensions/ for deleteicons.

I disable favicons completely; about:config -> browser.chrome.{favicons,site_icons} -> false.

casey1992 · Post by **casey1992** » February 14th, 2006, 5:19 pm

To turn bookmark files into valid code, I've had success following these steps.

Start by running the bookmarks through <a href="http://infohound.net/tidy/">HTML Tidy Online</a>. On the web page, above the settings, follow the ">> Advanced" link. Check the box that says "Drop proprietary attributes", then run Tidy.

That'll clean out all the junk except the IDs. (They're standard code.) To get rid of those, I open my tidied file in a text editor that handles regular expressions (in my case, mi), then do a find and replace. In the find box, type...

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id.*"

Make sure the 'replace with' box is empty. Then hit the 'replace all' button.

The addition of a decent doctype, head information, and ending body and html tags should finish up the job.

scratch · Post by **scratch** » February 14th, 2006, 5:32 pm

the extension is here:
http://www.gozer.org/mozilla/extensions/

not that you need it anymore.

Grist · Post by **Grist** » February 14th, 2006, 6:04 pm

Load bookmarks.html in Firefox then execute this bookmarklet:

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javascript:(function(){ var ls=document.getElementsByTagName('*'); for (var i=0; i<ls.length; i++) {l=ls[i]; l.removeAttribute('id'); l.removeAttribute('last_charset'); l.removeAttribute('icon'); l.removeAttribute('last_modified'); l.removeAttribute('last_visit'); l.removeAttribute('add_date'); l.removeAttribute('personal_toolbar_folder');} alert('Cleanup Complete - Save as Web Page, Complete')})();

When finished, save as "Web Page, Complete".

Lost User 133863 · February 15th, 2006, 3:01 am

Casey, Grist and Jinexile - thank you oh so very much!
I'm totally bookmarking this page.

Also, some of this should really go on some FAQ.