Invalid SMS

[Darthanian]

Not sure what to provide to help this issue.

I have this back up to my drop box then read it from there. The file opens fine in the program on my phone, but I can't see them here.

[andrewhamili]

It happened to me also. I have used this application 2 years ago and it worked fine, but not today.

[devadvance]

Since the app was published many years ago, there may be issues with some of the newer features in SMS Backup & Restore, such as emoji and special characters. I'm working on a browser-based version that I'll (hopefully) release soon that has proper emoji/special character support.

[andrewhamili]

Thanks. I'll be waiting for that. :)

[devadvance]

@andrewhamili It's still very much a work in progress, but try out http://mattj.io/sms-backup-reader-2/main

Styling is still messy due to testing, and loading large files will take some time. It should work in Chrome, Firefox, or Safari. All data is loaded locally; nothing gets sent anywhere.

[Darthanian]

Worked in chrome better I think, I had a 80~ meg file, it loaded some but not all of it. No sort function either, that i could see. I prefer newest on top. Could use a loading bar or something saying it's processing the xml file. I selected it and it didn't do anything, then just popped up with some of the msgs..

[bpappin]

+1 looks like its some kind of unicode char in the file it doesn't like.

[bpappin]

the web version doesn't work well for me, since I need to be able to Print or save as PDF and the Angular one doesn't support that very well.

[adbakke]

I also could not use the Web version because I need to print them in some way.

Since it cannot handle special characters I had to use something else.

For anyone that comes across this my solution was this:

Open in Excel as XML document. It will fail, but will give you a line number where it fails. Go ahead and go through and remove all instances of encoded(?) characters that look like this: �

The pattern I used was &#5xxxx; and removed all. Then I was able to import into Excel again and it worked. I hid any extraneous columns and was able to print that way.