rakhesh.com

I was on Firefox today and wanted to search for a bookmark. I found the bookmark easily, but unlike Chrome Firefox has no way of showing which folder the bookmark is present in. So I created a PowerShell script to do just that. Mainly because I wanted some excuse to code in PowerShell and also because it felt like an interesting problem.

PowerShell can’t directly control Firefox as it doesn’t have a COM interface (unlike IE). So you’ll have to manually export the bookmarks. Good for us the export is into a JSON file, and PowerShell can read JSON files natively (since version 3.0 I think). The ConvertFrom-JSON cmdlet is your friend here. So export bookmarks and read them into a variable:

This gives me a tree structure of bookmarks.

Notice the children property. It is an array of further objects – links to the first-level folders, basically. Each of these in turn have links to the second-level folders and so on.

The type property is a good way of identifying if a node is a folder or a bookmark. If it’s text/x-moz-place-container then it’s a folder. If it’s text/x-moz-place then it’s a bookmark. (Alternatively one could also test whether the children property is $null).

So how do we go through this tree and search each node? Initially I was going to iteratively do it by going to each node. Then I remembered recursion (see! no exercise like this goes wasted! I had forgotten about recursion). So that’s easy then.

• Make a function. Pass it the bookmarks object.
• Said function looks at the object passed to it.
  • If it’s a bookmark it searches the title and lets us know if it’s a match.
  • If it’s a folder, the function calls itself with the next level folder as input.

Here’s the function:

I decided to search folder names too. And just to distinguish between folder names and bookmark names, I use different colors.

Call the function thus (after exporting & reading the bookmarks into a variable):

Here’s a screenshot of the output: