Look! It's a snake! To be precise, it's a Boa photostolenfromnationalgeographae constrictor.

Oh Lord, I’m so sorry.

I once heard a story about a magnificent exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair— there was a great monument to the synergy of mind, hand, and electromechanical accomplishment— a fully functional 40 foot steel typewriter.

Children and adults alike would carefully crawl up the giant black injection-molded keys until they reached their favorite letter, at which point they started jumping furiously to activate the spring-loaded key.

When it finally gave way, they’d sit down and marvel at the thunderous spirit they had awakened. There was a magnificent whiffle tree mechanism which spun a solid metal typeball with such heft that you couldn’t help but imagine whether the Earth itself was the type element of God’s cosmic typewriter— his tool for imprinting the ribbon of time with the ink of fate.

They called it an I-beam Selectric.

Sometimes you hear a story which involves the confluence of so many strange coincidences, you’re almost certain that it’s all build-up for some colossal letdown of a punchline.

That’s what the title— “Microsoft Outlook Offline Address Book (OAB) Format Parser in Python” should probably evoke— and if that wasn’t enough, the photo of a BOA Constrictor on the thumbnail should certainly put it over the edge.

I don’t expect anyone in the world to find a legitimate use of something like this, but I feel obligated to write a blog post anyway. So I’ll write it about the vague subject of bad puns— because I happened to name an OAB parser written in a certain snake-related language an anagram of the format which shares a name with a particular snake-related snake.

2.0 isn’t an actual version number, but i’ve added the new one.

it’s basically

Parent ID (or _body) > Element tag name : Parent Index > format type = patch/innerhtml data

or

_body>div:0>span:1>d=hello!

the formats are p, d, and o, or Patch, HTML, and Legacy, respectively. Patch uses diff-match-patch, unidiff style data. Patch is the same, and Legacy is an intermediate format of sorts, which is easily converted to from the old formats, but still follows the general pattern of location>type=data. The only difference between Legacy and HTML is that legacy uses a different location scheme.

The pluses of this new system, is that it’s more accurate, and your edits are more resistant to page changes. The data is more human readable, the system is more reliable, and stores less data on the server. The cons, are that there is a 20kb overhead in wikify core, and saving may take some more time.

In a comming version, a new function, would be to have interactive tutorials, where friendly arrows tell you where to click, drag, etc.

I’m working on a better save/preview file format, even merging the save/preview formats into one.

it’s just a string seperated by “;;” before it, is a standard JSON Array. After, is the standard XML compiler stuff. the json has info like framerate,height,width,current frame, tweens, keyframes, animation length, comments?, rating?, size? etc.

the javascript save/load implementation is so far done.