Migrating LG Phone-Link contacts to Horizon Integrator

If you’ve used LG’s Phone-Link software for any reasonable period of time, you should have a large XML file in your %appdata%\PHONE-LiNK directory named Recent.xml.

Make a copy of this and get it on a computer with a Linux environment. For this process, we’re going to need xmllint from the libxml2-utils package and xmlstarlet from the xmlstarlet package.

Once these are installed, verify your Recent.xml file is the expected unholy mess we’ve come to know and love via less Recent.xml. Once you’ve been sufficiently disheartened, close less by pressing q.

From this, make a backup as that’s always a good idea:

cp "Recent.xml" "backup-Recent.xml"

Now we’re going to lint the file, merge the incoming and outgoing blocks, and build a CSV file:

xmllint "Recent.xml" --format --output "Recent.xml"
sed -i 's/CalledContact/CallerContact/g' "Recent.xml"
xmlstarlet sel -T -t -m /Recent/CallerContact -v "concat(Name,';',Contact,';',Tel,';;',Email,';',Company)" -n "Recent.xml" > "Recent.csv"

Now we have a messy CSV file with the information in it we wanted.

We’re going to sort this, remove unecessary entries (from places with no names) and fix up the delimiters (as Phone-Link will save Names as Contact, Company which breaks CSV files):

sort -b -u -o "Recent.csv" "Recent.csv"
sed -i '/^(/d' "Recent.csv"
sed -i 's/, / - /g' "Recent.csv"
sed -i 's/;/,/g' "Recent.csv"

Last but not least, we’re going to add our header row, again using sed:

sed -i '1 i\First Name,Last Name,Number,Extension,Email,Company' "Recent.csv"

Now you can start working your way through the inane and sometimes arcane Horizon Company Directory requirements, as detailed below:

• No brackets
• No @ symbols (except for email addresses)
• No apostrophes
• No ampersands
• No slashes
• No hashes
• No periods
• No hyphens
• No spaces
• 15 characters max
• No empty fields (except for extension, and email)

The way I go about this is to split the columns into separate files, apply the filters and then rebuild the file afterwards.

So, let’s get splitting:

for i in {1..6}; do cut -f"$i" -d\, "Recent.csv" > "column-$i.txt"; done

Here is where I manually split the Name field into First Name and Last Name. I did this manually as some names didn’t nicely fit into the A B format.

Now we’ve got our columns split, lets get processing those invalid characters. You’ll need to process each file individually, as certain files need certain filters.

sed -i -e "s/#//g" file.txt # hash symbols
sed -i -e "s/'//g" file.txt # apostrophes
sed -i -e "s/@//g" file.txt # at symbols
sed -i -e "s/\///g" file.txt # slashes
sed -i -e "s/&//g" file.txt # ampersands
sed -i -e "s/(//g" file.txt # open brackets
sed -i -e "s/)//g" file.txt # close brackets
sed -i -e "s/-//g" file.txt # hyphens
sed -i -e "s/ //g" file.txt # spaces
sed -i -e 's/\.//g' file.txt # periods
sed -i -e 's/^$/x/' file.txt # replace blank lines
sed -i -e "s/^\(.\{15\}\).*/\1/g" file.txt # snip columns to length

Once done, merge the files back together using paste, removing duplicates with uniq:

paste -d, column-{1..6}.txt | uniq > Recent-processed.csv

Now try to upload the resulting file, and manually fix any inevitable errors that will have cropped up like duplicate entries and trailing invalid characters. Above is the process I used for my dataset.