Home » Documentation » SMS to Text File(s)

SMS to Text File(s)

SMS Enabler can automatically save incoming SMS messages into a single text file or a set of multiple files. Depending on the File mode setting, it can save all messages into a single file, create a new file for each day, or save each message to a separate file.

By default, SMS Enabler saves messages in the My Documents\SMS Enabler directory. You can change this location in the settings dialog box.

File Format for the single file and file per day File Modes

In the single file and file per day modes, the file format is CSV.
Each line corresponds to a message, containing four fields separated by the field separator character. The separator character can be set to tab, comma or semicolon in SMS Enabler's settings.

The CSV fields are as follows:

  1. Sender phone number
  2. Message text
  3. SMS center time stamp (the time the sender sent the message)
  4. The date and time this message was saved to this file

The sender phone and message text fields are enclosed in double quotes("), and each of the double quotes embeded in these fields is doubled. Date/time fields are the local date/time represented in this format: "YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS".

File Format for the file per message File Mode

In this mode, each file corresponds to a single message. A message file has at least four lines:

  • First line: The SMS center time stamp (the time the sender has sent the message).
  • Second line: The date and time that this message was saved to this file.
  • Third line: The sender's phone number.
  • Fourth and subsequent lines: The message text.

Note: If you use the file per message mode for processing messages in your application, there is a small chance that your application will try to open a message file before SMS Enabler has finished writing to it. This may cause your application to receive an access error opening the file. If this occurs, your application should skip this file and process it in the next itteration, or wait a short period of time (such as a half second or one second) and try again.

File Naming

For the single file file mode, the file name is messages.txt

For the file per day file mode, the file name is messagesYYYYMMDD.txt where:
YYYY = year
MM = month
DD = day

For the file per message file mode, the file name is messageYYYYMMDD_HHmmSS_N.txt where:
YYYY = year
MM = month
DD = day
HH = hour (based on a 24-hour clock)
mm = minutes
SS = seconds
N = file number since the program last started