Choose conversations to export

[ReagentX]

This came from feature request #51.

Right now, imessage-exporter exports every conversation it can see. It could be useful to specify specific conversation(s).

The easiest way to accomplish this is to know the chat's ID in the table, but even that may not be correct due to the duplication problem. We can of course show this to the user, but selecting from a list in a reasonable manner is an interesting UX problem.

I don't want to emit a huge list and expect the user to read through it, there must be a way to live-search it.

[Debusan13]

I would think that a CLI option along the lines of --people=first_last,first1_last1 would be dirty but get the job done. One library that might come in handy is Rust Fuzzy Matcher though exact implementation would fall to you.

Maybe to make everyone's life easier, using the address book sources stored in /Library/Application Support/AddressBook/Sources would be the best bet. This directory has other subdirectories in it, the largest one contains all the contacts in .abcdp format which is just a database file. From here each chat could be labelled with contact names rather than the raw phone number.

For iOS backups (which I plan on making a larger issue report on) the contacts should be stored in $iPhone_Backup/ '31' / '31bb7ba8914766d4ba40d6dfb6113c8b614be442'. Again not the cleanest solution to hardcode it in but this is the equivalent to a "contacts.db" (Source: iMessageBackup (python))

Hope some of this additional research could help, I know you did a lot already so apologies if I'm retreading ground.

[toomim]

I'm encountering this, too. I'm glad there are folks looking into it!