gnokii --writephonebook niggles

[Oliver, Peter]

I've just used gnokii 0.6.0 to copy my old phonebook onto my new handset.
My old handset was a 7110, and I had previously used the software that
shipped with the phone to sync it's phonebook with Outlook.

My plan was to read the old phonebook with "gnokii --getphonebook ME 1 end
--raw > pb.raw" and write it back to the new handset with "gnokii
--writephonebook < pb.raw".  Perhaps I should have used the --vcard or
--ldif options, instead, but they're not documented in the manual.  Here are
a few problems I had:

You need to use the "-o" to write a phonebook.  If you don't, gnokii asks
you to confirm.  However, it reads the answer to this question from STDIN,
and rather getting the answer it just gets the next line of the input file!

Some contacts had email addresses but no phone numbers.  Gnokii wrote out
lines of the form "Name;;ME;...", and when it tried to read these lines back
in it errored "Write FAILED (Data format is not valid.)".  Presumably this
is a parsing bug.  Fortunately, inserting "0" between the first two
semicolons as a dummy phone number proved to be a workaround.

Outlook puts semicolons in it's address fields.  Gnokii successfully gets
them from the phone and writes them out.  When it tries to read them back
in, it sees them as separators, and issues the error "There is no phone
number on line [...] entry n".  I had to manually remove the semicolons.
There needs to be some mechanism for escaping ";".

Other than that, great work.  The official Nokia software for Windows failed
to detect my 6310i down my DAU-9P cable.

-- 
Peter Oliver
Midrange Services
Central Networks


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