SkypeSearch

Command-line script to search for a particular string in group conversations created by Skype (in local sqlite3 db). Skype for Linux did not support group chats at the time of producing this tool; for now SkypeSearch only works on Windows.

Getting Started

1. Make sure Python 3 is installed on your machine.

2. cd into the directory you downloaded and extracted SkypeSearch into.

3. From a Windows command prompt: chcp 65001

4. set PYTHONIOENCODING=utf-8. These two commands are necessary to prepare the Windows terminal for Unicode output.

5. python search.py [-h] username query [-c], and follow the on-screen instructions. -h is for help and -c is for case-insensitive searching.

6. Enjoy searching for old Skype messages you thought everyone forgot about! :)

7. Pipe to more or some other formatting command to view output in multiple pages, as there may be a lot of results returned back.

Ideas

• Skype creates XML when emoticons or special formatting are used in messages. Strip the tags and possibly replace them with Unicode equivalents.

• Provide regex and other filtering options in Seacher in search.py.

• Add support for non-group conversations. Skype stores these in a different sqlite3 table.

• Auto-detect username based on folder structure rather than requiring manual entry.

• Improve documentation and transition to typehinted methods (i.e. latest Python 3 syntax).

• Create GUI as alternative to command-line.

• Find a way to exclude call to unit tests and other untestable lines from coverage percentage.

• Linux support