Hello, all. I'm new here. Found the site while searching for a specific program and registered. I recently ran into this small problem, and as an average computer user who has absolutely no coding background, I'm at a total loss despite the simplicity of the issue. After many hours of frustration while trying various things with my limited knowledge, I decided to try posting here in the hopes the community can give me a hand.
I use
Green Browser, which is a more of a Trident/IE based browser frontend. It can create these "groups", which are basically a more organized collection of favorites/bookmarks. I would like to have a small program to convert/export these groups into a html file such as those used by Chrome/Chromium to import as bookmarks. (More specifically, I use another custom Blink/Chromium browser called
Slimjet, and would like to import to there, but I believe the format is probably universal for all Chrome/Chromium variants.)
Each Green Browser group is a bunch of urls, with each url given a name/label, and saved in a customized order. The info is stored as what I believe to be ANSI encoded text, with each group saved as an individual Windows file, the base file name being the group name and with the "cgp" custom extension. Here's an example (see attachment for original file):
File name: "Example Group.cgp"
[Group]
name0=BBC - Homepage
url0=http://www.bbc.com/
name1=Yahoo
url1=https://www.yahoo.com/
name2=Google
url2=https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl
name3=CNN.co.jp : NASAの「空飛ぶ円盤」、ハワイで飛行実験
url3=http://www.cnn.co.jp/fringe/35065380.html?tag=rcol;editorSelect
As for the Chrome bookmarks html file, I've also included a sample export. (Please see attached file for reference, the contents are too long to post here.) I don't know much about html formatting, but after analyzing the content, I believe, the main thing that's required to have Slimjet (Chrome) recognize the urls and their names, is to have each be reformatted from the above into such a format:
<DT><A HREF="(url)">(name)</A>
The key things are to preserve each url, its name/label, and of course the order in which the urls are stored in for each group. I think you can safely ignore and exclude the other tags, such as "add date"; and of course the final file still needs the proper titles/meta tags to designate it as a html, but I'm not sure what exactly is required, as I'm don't know enough about html formatting.
Additionally, each group name can be stored as a folder name for the bookmarks, which would be at a different level than the individual urls in the html formatting, and lastly everything should be stored under a unique top level folder name, perhaps based on the date/time generated, or allow user input, so as to avoid overwriting or mixing in with existing bookmarks when importing.
Finally, a crucial thing to note is that although the groups are stored in
*what I believe* to be ANSI encoding (someone can examine the file and correct me if I'm wrong), they actually can contain any number of characters, some of which are not included in ANSI, such as this ・ (U+30FB) or ・ (U+FF65). (If you cannot correctly display the symbol, see the wikipedia link
here and jump to the Japanese section.) They are sometimes stored as just a "?" in a Green Browser group file due to the limits of the ANSI encoding, and there can be quite a few of them. The program needs to be able to handle the symbols, but does not need to preserve or restore the original symbols. It merely needs to be able to at least put a space in the place of these, or remove them (ideally, an program setting option to decide which would be best). I have on hand a small program that's suppose to be able to convert from Green Browser groups into IE favorites, and it would generate errors and fail at the conversion randomly, likely due to these characters. I've attached it here as well if someone wants a reference point. The program I'm requesting to convert to Chrome bookmarks html needs to be able to handle these symbols without failing in the same way.
Once again, the main goal is I really need something to help me convert a large number of Green Browser groups files into an html file that can be imported for Chrome (Slimjet) bookmarks. If anyone can help me out with this, then after that, perhaps other things can be added, such as support for converting back from bookmarks into groups, and perhaps adding support for other browsers that have groups with similar formatting, IE favorites, etc. Your help would be tremendously appreciated.