Re: awk or sed program to convert mbox files to HTML
On Wed, Nov 26, 2025 at 3:40 PM <rhkramer@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Does anybody here know of an AWK or sed program to convert mbox files to HTML?
I don't think sed and awk are good choices for the task.
In the past, I wrote a C++ program to parse an mbox file and analyze
the files in the collection.
I had a terrible time parsing subject: lines with emojis and printing
them. That's UTF-8 encoding per RFC2047, and it looks like
"=?utf-8?b?4pyF?=". The parsing and conversion from UTF-8 was not
bad. And conversion to PDF was not bad. But all the open source
tools, like LibreOffice and OpenOffice, could not print them properly.
> My google (well, ddg) fu has not been very helpful -- I've turned up proprietary programs to do that, most of which run on Windows :-(
Try <https://www.google.com/search?q=parse+mbox+site:github.com>.
> I need to have the source code as I will need to modify the conversion in some special ways.
>
> I guess I could use something other than AWK or sed, but I'm reluctant to use (and learn) some other language (including things like Perl, C[++], or Python, although I think I'd like the syntax of Python the best, just wish it was compiled instead of interpreted (P-code, iiuc)).
>
> I know that maildir is the currently favored approach for mail storage, but I have well over 100 MB of emails (or pseudo emails) stored in mbox files, and want to convert them for easy viewing on the Internet (by anyone).
One last point... the mbox format is specified in RFC 4155,
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc4155/>.
Jeff
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