Manipulating Firefox Bookmarks

Description

A command-line utility to convert a backup of Firefox bookmarks (JSON file) into plain text, plain text with extra formatting, or Markdown.

Output is to stdout and intended to be used in conjunction with file redirection.

For example, on a POSIX-compliant OS (e.g. Linux, BSD, and MacOS):

manipulate_firefox_bookmarks.py SOMETHING > FILE

And on Windows (PowerShell):

manipulate_firefox_bookmarks.py SOMETHING | out-file FILE

Repository

• https://github.com/JamesLochhead/manipulate_firefox_bookmarks
• This post will not be updated in the future, please see the repository for future updates.

Requirements

• Python3
• Currently any OS (tested only on Linux). Future updates may be Linux only.

Usage

Output a list of all bookmark titles to stdout:

./manipulate_firefox_bookmarks.py PATH_TO_BOOKMARKS_FILE

Output a list of all bookmarks titles to stdout with spaces for child objects:

./manipulate_firefox_bookmarks.py PATH_TO_BOOKMARKS_FILE --pretty_text spaces

Output a list of all bookmarks titles to stdout with tabs for child objects:

./manipulate_firefox_bookmarks.py PATH_TO_BOOKMARKS_FILE --pretty_text tabs

Convert the bookmarks to JSON and output to stdout, first heading is a h1:

./manipulate_firefox_bookmarks.py PATH_TO_BOOKMARKS_FILE --to_markdown 1

• to_markdown will accept 1 - 6 as an argument.

Project Motivation

As someone on the operations side of IT, I find there is a lot of professional value in my bookmarks collection.

When I find something of value, I want to find it again quickly and I don’t want to waste a lot of time writing it down (unless there’s value to that exercise). I find bookmarks are one of the better solutions to this problem.

However, I don’t want that value to be locked into one medium or one company’s service (however great Mozilla may be).

Conversion to other mediums allows for extra value such as being able to use more powerful search functionality (e.g. grep, sed, awk, and fzf), access from a terminal emulator, and access from networks where Firefox accounts are blocked.

Design

A backup of Firefox bookmarks (JSON) is converted into a general tree structure (GeneralTree). The GeneralTree is traversed and converted into different formats using recursive instance methods.

A GeneralTree object represents the tree and holds most of the useful methods to accomplish the applications end-goals. Each GeneralTree holds references to a single Node and all child GeneralTrees (as a list). The class has methods for conversion to markdown, text, and pretty text (i.e. spacing). There is also a method to return all the bookmarks (as Node objects) as a list.

A Node object represents nodes on the tree and its function is to hold data on each bookmark or bookmark container. Setter/getter methods and methods to confirm that Node attributes match criteria.

Python 3 argparse is used to parse command-line arguments

Ideas For Extension

• Poll places.sqlite for changes and automate data conversion and file creation when changes are made.

• Add HTML as a conversion option. Allow tags, classes, and ids to be user specified.

• Allow functionality for the output of objects, such that other Python 3 applications can use them.

• Flesh out the existing conversion options and make them more configurable.

• More options than merely the title for conversion to plain text.

• Convert date values..