Silbacre

Silbacre (SILence BACkup REader) is an API for reading backup files from Silence (previously known as SMSSecure).

Silbacre is most easily used casually as a script.

silbacre /path/to/backup.xml

That will provide what looks like a normal Python console (code.interact()), but some variables are pre-defined. The most commonly used variable will of course be the messages themselves. They are, as can be expected messages. This is a list of dictionaries. (Described below under the heading Message keys.)

Searching

A class is also defined called SearchTerm. This can be used with the convenience function search. The SearchTerm supports the & and | binary operators with tuples or other SearchTerms. An example to check for messages containing 'morning' that were sent in the afternoon is below:

>>> def is_afternoon(date):
...     return date.hour >= 12
...
>>> has_morning = SearchTerm(('body', 'morning', None))
>>> search(has_morning & ('date', is_afternoon, Search.function))

The first argument is which key of the message is being checked. The second is the value it should match, and the third is how to define a match. The options are Search.lowercase, Search.regex, and Search.function.

The default (None) is Search.lowercase, which just sees if 'hello' (in any capitalization) is found in the body.

If instead of checking containment, you have a more complicated check, you could use Search.regex, in which case re.match() is used.

The last gives more customization. Instead of providing a string as what should be matched, a function is given (or any callable) and the type is set as Search.function. The function will be given message[key], where key is of course the first argument, in our case 'date' (which is a datetime.datetime object as described below in Message keys). If None is given as the key, the message dictionary will be the supplied argument. The function should then return True for a successful match or False for a no-match.

Message keys

The keys in each message dictionary are the same as in the original XML file except for these changes:

• name is the name of the contact if a contacts .vcf file is provided and the contact is found. Otherwise, same as address. Note that contacts with pictures are not recognized by strudel, the VCard parsing library used. (I am happy to hear recommendations for a better library.)
• address is the phone number of the contact. Silence does not standardize the format, so Silbacre does (with phonenumbers, a port of Google's excellent library). An example number in the standardized format would be (121) 222-3333
• date in the original backup is a number. For example, 1478026211916 is the date of one of my messages. All but the last three digits are what form the seconds since the Epoch. Beyond that is what's after the decimal: 1478026211.916. To make it easier, Silbacre just converts that to a datetime.datetime object.

The following table describes all keys. (Italicized are the keys that are in the original backup, but I have found no explanation for.)