Question

I have my web browsers set to save what I type into text boxes on forms. I have a lot of search terms stored in the text box of my browser and would like to get at it via a program of some sort before I clear these values out. There are far too many for me to go through one at a time.

The web browser must store this data somewhere, does anyone know where? Is it possible to retrieve these values? Firefox, more so than IE — but either, if anyone knows a script that can extract these values? Thanks.

Answer 1

Firefox 3

In Firefox on Windows it’s stored in a SQLite file, in:

C:\Documents and Settings\<Username>\Application Data     \Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<UID>.default\formhistory.sqlite 

Once you have the SQLite file, you can put together a script to read the data from it pretty quickly – here’s a good primer to using SQLite with PHP 5 for example.

Firefox pre-version 3

Apparently SQLite has only been used for the saved form history since version 3. Version 2 still uses formhistory.dat, which is written using Mork.

From the wiki on Mork:

Also, despite being plain text, Mork is generally regarded as unintelligible to humans and as a hard format to write parsers for.

There has been an item files on Bugzilla asking for a more sane and readable format to be introduced, the filer even attempted to write a perl parser for his .dat files, with limited success.