jmork - A Java Implementation of a Mork Parser

• written by Mike Haller
• contributions by Wolfgang Fahl - BITPlan GmbH - http://www.bitplan.com

About

• Mork is a text "database" format used by Mozilla applications like Firefox and Thunderbird to store some data. Mainly the URL History of Firefox and the address book of Thunderbird is stored in the (rather weird) Mork format.
• This is a Java Implementation which can be used to parse .mab Files on a raw level.
• The current version of the data format is v1.4.

Primary Goals of this project

• Parse the Mork format to be able to read in a Thunderbird Addressbook
• Provide an initial open-source place for Mork-related tools implemented in Java

Main Drawbacks of Mork

• Rather complex, not human readable, not space saving, weird referencing, multiple escape characters, C-style and HTML-style comments are mixed.
• Is going to be replaced by a more general standard

Ideas which could be implemented in the future

• Implement an Address Book parser on top of the mork implementation to parse Mozilla Thunderbird address books. Or even write the files.

More information about Mork