Migrating Apple's Address Book data to Linux [SOLVED]

[elvanor]

Hi there,

I have under Mac OS X my Address Book full of contacts. I want to export them and reimport them under Linux. Ideally, I'd like to use the Mozilla address book under Gentoo, but KAddressBook is also acceptable.

Apparently, Address Book under OS X, as a typical closed source program, only can export to vcard format. Fine; KAddressBook should be able to import vcf format. Except it does not work. The file, when transferred to Linux, appears to be a binary file, but I don't know what that means.

Let's say the file is named contact.vcf. If I "cat contact.vcf", everything appears ok on the terminal, however, if I type "nano contact.vcf", the text is filled with a ton of garbage characters (which appear like @ on the screen I think). If I open the file with Kate, it just says that the file is not a text file but a binary file.

For me, there is no difference at all between text files and binary files, wtf is that? Maybe Kate cannot display characters in the file because they don't correspond to an ASCII character, but I don't understand how it can classify the file as "binary".

Anyway, any help would be welcome to solve my actual problem and migrate my contacts to Gentoo.

Elvanör

[janosh]

Well, if cat works, you could redirect the cat output to aother file:

[elvanor]

No, the cat stuff did not work, but I figured what was wrong using an hex editor.

The file was encoded in UTF-16 by the Mac (even though I said in the Preferences to export as UTF-8...). So, I had to convert it to UTF-8 first in order for KAddressBook to import it.