parsing Palm databases

morgon has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am a bit reluctant to ask this (as it sort of reveals how old I have become) but I finally retired my Palm about a year ago.

However I still want to hold on to some information stored on the device, so I am trying to parse the datebook and memo pdbs from a backup with perl.

Datebook seems to work, I can e.g. do this

use strict;

use Data::Dumper;
use Palm::Datebook;

my $pdb = new Palm::Datebook;
$pdb->Load("CalendarDB-PDat.pdb");

print Dumper($pdb);
[download]

And this produces something I can process further, however parsing memos does not work at all:

use strict;

use Data::Dumper;
use Palm::Memo;

my $pdb = new Palm::Memo;
$pdb->Load("MemosDB-PMem.pdb");

print Dumper($pdb);
[download]

This simply dies with

"No handler defined for creator "PMem", type "DATA"

It's been years since I last tried to parse pdbs with perl and while I can (vaguely) remember that I've had issues in the past I cannot remember anything, so I am looking for a way to parse palm memo-databases in perl...

Many thanks!

Comment on parsing Palm databases Select or Download Code

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Re: parsing Palm databases by haukex (Archbishop) on May 18, 2019 at 08:03 UTC
I use `palm2ical` from http://hepunx.rl.ac.uk/~adye/software/palm/palm2ical/, which uses Palm::Datebook, although that doesn't do memos. However, looking at its code, plus the examples in Palm distro, gives me this code, which works for me: `use Palm::Memo; my $pdb = Palm::PDB->new(); $pdb->Load($filename); use Data::Dump; dd $pdb;` [download] Another alternative, although not Perl, is to use J-Pilot to open the files directly.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: parsing Palm databases by morgon (Priest) on May 19, 2019 at 01:56 UTC
Thanks for your reply, however your code also produces the same error message on my system when I try to load "MemosDB-PMem.pdb". `No handler defined for creator "PMem", type "DATA"` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: parsing Palm databases by haukex (Archbishop) on May 19, 2019 at 08:42 UTC
On my system, `MemoDB.pdb` and `MemosDB-PMem.pdb` have exactly the same textual content (as per strings), with different binary formats. I can reproduce the error message with the latter file, but the former works. My understanding is that the latter file is from newer Palm versions, and I guess it's possible that if you have a newer Palm, you only have `MemosDB-PMem.pdb`? In that case, sorry, I'm not sure where to go from there, Google results are pretty thin. Have you tried J-Pilot? As far as I can tell from the source code, it can read both formats.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^4: parsing Palm databases by morgon (Priest) on May 20, 2019 at 02:43 UTC

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