How can I read the "attributedBody" column in macOS' iMessage database? - objective-c

Question

Apple changed the Messages database schema in the latest macOS Ventura update, and sent messages seem to no longer store their body/content in the text column. The attributedBody column has the content, but it's stored as an encoded blob.
Has anyone had any luck getting plaintext out of this?

Answer 1

The attributedBody column is a serialized NSMutableAttributedString — packed using NSArchiver. It can be unpacked and read using NSUnarchiver but must first be extracted from the Messages sqlite database without losing any of its non-printable characters.
To preserve the column's content when performing a query, you can use sqlite3's HEX() function. The resulting bytes can then be read back into their original state by iterating over them and building a new NSString.
In the example below, NSData is extended with two helper methods to handle reading a file with hex-encoded data. Using dataWithContentsOfHexEncodedFile, a message record's attributedBody can be passed to NSUnarchiver, which will handle decoding the serialized NSAttributedString. This can then be converted to a normal NSString by accessing the string property.
#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>
#implementation NSData (NSDataExtended)
+ (NSData *)dataWithContentsOfHexEncodedString:(NSString *) string {
const char * chars = [string UTF8String];
int i = 0;
NSMutableData *data = [NSMutableData dataWithCapacity: string.length / 2];
char byteChars[3] = {'\0', '\0', '\0'};
unsigned long wholeByte;
while (i < string.length) {
byteChars[0] = chars[i++];
byteChars[1] = chars[i++];
wholeByte = strtoul(byteChars, NULL, 16);
[data appendBytes:&wholeByte length:1];
}
return data;
}
+ (NSData *)dataWithContentsOfHexEncodedFile:(NSString *) filePath {
return [self dataWithContentsOfHexEncodedString:[NSString
stringWithContentsOfFile:filePath
encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding
error:nil]];
}
#end
int main(int argc, const char * argv[]) {
system([[[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:#"%s %s > %s",
"/usr/bin/sqlite3 ~/Library/Messages/chat.db",
"'SELECT HEX(attributedBody) FROM message ORDER BY ROWID DESC LIMIT 1'",
"/private/tmp/msgbody"] UTF8String]);
#pragma clang diagnostic ignored "-Wdeprecated-declarations"
NSMutableAttributedString *msg = [[[NSUnarchiver alloc]
initForReadingWithData:[NSData dataWithContentsOfHexEncodedFile:#"/private/tmp/msgbody"]
] decodeTopLevelObjectAndReturnError:nil];
NSLog(#"%#", [msg string]);
return 0;
}