Contact Details Not Resolving, Phone Number Only

[DevMan01]

When I run:
imessage-exporter -f html -o /Users/...

The tool successully exports and builds the export, with one exception - All of HTML files, and chat mentions are titled or addressed using individuals phone numbers, and not their contact name in the MacOS Contacts.

Is this a bug? User error? Or a feature that needs to be developed?

[ReagentX]

This software interacts with the iMessage database only; contacts are not stored inside of it. This tool only targets features that are directly related to the iMessage tables.

[paulasyn]

@DevMan01 not really a direct solution but you can try making this a script to run through all your conversations with numbers and possibly have success with this?

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/72652/contacts-app-command-line-interface

[PhilMac]

Such an ability would make this tool so much more useful to me—I get that this software itself will only access the iMessage database, but if someone were to write a script using the tool @paulasyn mentioned it would be awesome. (A pity I don't have the skills to do it myself!)

[bdillahu]

Such an ability would make this tool so much more useful to me—I get that this software itself will only access the iMessage database, but if someone were to write a script using the tool @paulasyn mentioned it would be awesome. (A pity I don't have the skills to do it myself!)

I know this is was late, but I cobbled this script up and it's worked for me... no guarantees, but if it helps anybody:

cd ~/imessage_export/

# path to the contacts tool from https://github.com/shanecelis/contacts

# I'm replacing any number that I find in my contacts with the full name of the contact and the number in parens ()
# build table of sed commands
# dumps entire contacts database names (%n) and mobild number (%mp)
# the first gsub removes "-", "(", ")", " ", or "+1" (at the start of the string
# the second gsub removes trailing spaces from the names field
# if there is a mobile number in field $2
# the print command forms the sed command structure
# dumps table into repl.sed temp file

~/tools/contacts/contacts -H -l -f "%n:%mp" | awk -F: '{gsub(/-|\(|\)| |^\+1/, "", $2); gsub(/[ \t]+$/, "", $1); if ($2) print "s|<span class=\"sender\">+1"$2"</span></p>|<span class=\"sender\">"$1" (+1"$2")</span></p>|g"}' > repl.sed

# run sed against the file passed in
find ~/imessage_export -type f -maxdepth 1 -name "*.html" -exec sed -f repl.sed -i '' {} \;

# clean up temp file
rm repl.sed

[johnburnett]

Thanks for this awesome tool, @ReagentX! On the outside chance it's useful to someone... I have a personal Python script for wrangling contact information, and I just added a feature to update the imessage-exporter files with contact info pulled from a collection of vCard files. It's in this repo, added in this commit. I don't expect it to be directly usable by anyone, but it points a possible direction to go for other tools.