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How to export contacts to VCF 2.1 under Thunderbird 91 ?

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  • Last reply by Cbhihe

Cbhihe
Cbhihe

Hi, around Nov. 2020, TB started using VCF 4.0 to export address book contacts (beside csv, tsv and LDIF). Prior to that I happily exported to previous VCF formats (2.1 or 3.0). I need to go back to exporting to the VCF 2.1 format, in order to feed the exported file to some other legacy application that will only consider VCF 2.1. Is there a way to do so with TB 91.3 (under Linux) ? If so how ? Tx.

Hi, around Nov. 2020, TB started using VCF 4.0 to export address book contacts (beside csv, tsv and LDIF). Prior to that I happily exported to previous VCF formats (2.1 or 3.0). I need to go back to exporting to the VCF 2.1 format, in order to feed the exported file to some other legacy application that will only consider VCF 2.1. Is there a way to do so with TB 91.3 (under Linux) ? If so how ? Tx.

Chosen solution

Given that the vcard is a self describing XML formatted document with each version basically expanding on previous ones. Does just editing the resulting file and changing the stated vcard version allow it to work with ancient software that is checking the vcard version number??

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Matt
Matt
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Chosen Solution

Given that the vcard is a self describing XML formatted document with each version basically expanding on previous ones. Does just editing the resulting file and changing the stated vcard version allow it to work with ancient software that is checking the vcard version number??

Cbhihe
Cbhihe Question owner

Thanks Matt. Editing the file with either `sed` or `awk` or using python regex is always a possibility. I just did not want to reinvent the wheel in case something already existed. From what I saw out there, there is nothing readily available, so I will roll my own editing tool from the shell probably. The only menial issue is that VCF 4.0 introduces new sub categories for many parameter "keys", so I will need to look that up for about 3650 VCards. That's about 38000 lines of text altogether, (nothing `sed` or `awk` can't handle). What I am most concerned about is parsing non-ASCII characters (UTF-16) adequately.