Netscape Bookmark Parser

The Netscape Bookmark File Format is a format commonly used by Web browsers and Web bookmarking applications to export and import bookmarks.

It has a loose specification. It has no DTD and no XSL Stylesheet. You can treat it as XML with some quirks:

• some elements have an opening tag, but no closing tag:
  • <DT> items;
  • <DD> item descriptions;
• some elements have an opening and closing tag:
  • <A>...</A> bookmarks;
  • <H1>...</H1> export title;
  • <H3>...</H3> folder name;
• some elements have unusual opening and closing tags:
  • <DL><p>...</DL><p> item lists;
• depending on the implementation:
  • elements may (or may not) be capitalized;
  • some elements may (or may not) be nested;
  • some attributes may (or may not) be present.

Example Netscape Bookmark Document

<!DOCTYPE NETSCAPE-Bookmark-file-1>
<!-- This is an automatically generated file.
     It will be read and overwritten.
     DO NOT EDIT! -->
<TITLE>Bookmarks</TITLE>
<H1>Bookmarks</H1>
<DL><p>
    <DT><H3 ADD_DATE="1622567473" LAST_MODIFIED="1627855786">Favorites</H3>
    <DD>Add bookmarks here
    <DL><p>
        <DT><A HREF="https://domain.tld" ADD_DATE="1641057073" PRIVATE="1">Test Domain</A>
        <DT><A HREF="https://test.domain.tld" ADD_DATE="1641057073" LAST_MODIFIED="1646172586" PRIVATE="1">Test Domain II</A>
        <DD>Second test
    </DL><p>
</DL><p>

Go Parser

SparkleMuffin uses virtualtam/netscape-go to parse (unmarshal) and export (marshal) bookmarks using the Netscape Bookmark File Format.

Users can import or sync their existing bookmarks into SparkleMuffin. They can also export bookmarks for use with another bookmarking service.

virtualtam/netscape-go is also available as a standalone library for other projects to use.

It uses:

• Go’s encoding/xml package to parse most of the file;
• the HTML character escaping and unescaping of Go’s html package;
• previous work on Shaarli’s netscape-bookmark-parser, especially its test fixtures.