IE Favorite Upload Reception

Anon

I would like to create a small private application for uploading and downloading my bookmarks at work and at home.

I noticed that IE5 has a very nifty feature called ImportExportFavorites, and decided to
try it out. What the function does, basically, is post a HTML version of the Favorites folder to a specified URL.

However, I ran into problems when I tried to write a PHP script to accept the posted data. I cannot figure out how to handle the data. What I found out from the request is:

The data is POSTed
The CONTENT_TYPE is "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
The HTTP_USER_AGENT is "PostFavorites"

I also tried to examine the HTTP_POST_VARS, but found that the posted data was trashed somehow. My best guess here is that PHP has problems with the CONTENT_TYPE, but I can't say for sure..

My real question after all this is: Has anyone else tried this ?

Anon

heya,

I discovered that the HTTP_POST_VARS variable contained a number of items (sizeof($HTTP_POST_VARS) )that was pretty close to the number of bookmarks I had. I tried looping through the array with a $HTTP_POST_VARS[$i] effort but only got nulls. This finally worked:

<?php
$fp = fopen("books.html", "w");
$keysoutput = array_keys($HTTP_POST_VARS);
$valuesoutput = array_values($HTTP_POST_VARS);
for ($i=0;$i<sizeof($keysoutput);$i++) {
fwrite($fp,$keysoutput[$i]);
fwrite($fp,$valuesoutput[$i]);
}
fclose($fp);
?>

The keys and their associated values don't appear to 'match up' - try changing the fwrite statements to
fwrite($fp,"\nkey $i".$keysoutput[$i]);
fwrite($fp,"\nvalue $i".$valuesoutput[$i]);
and you'll se what I mean. The first (working) version of the script will build an html page with title, heading and a descriptive list of your bookmarks. You'll probably have to slap it all into a variable and split it up manually if you want to write description | url to a database.

hope that helps.
Allan

Anon

After a little bit more reading I found this on the format of the file:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/browser/external/overview/bookmark_file_format.asp

I also discovered that the HTTP_POST_VARS is an associative array so that whole looping through the HTTP_POST_VARS array thing was a waste of time. Also, if I'd read your post properly I would have noticed the first time that HTTP_POST_VARS was the place to start looking 🙂

later
allan

Anon

Thanks alot Allan.

I found the file format, and I bet your code will help me out when I go try it again tonight. I'll get back here if it doesn't. :-)

Anon

It seems like PHP doesn't handle this after all. If I write out all the array values into a file, I end up with about 75% of the content I expect. On the other hand, if I write out the keys and values concatenated, I end up with the whole content, only that the keys have spaces replaced with underscores.. Did you go any further with this issue Allan ?

Anon

I actually didn't. It appeared to be working on my side, but that was just a cursory look. I'll take another look and watch out for what's happening on your side.

-allan