Target software: Skype for Windows/Linux


What's all about?

Did you ever tried to export all your Skype history? It's a little bit boring to copy and paste every conversation in separate text file, isn't it? It's even worse if you use the Linux version of this famous chat client.

Did you ever wondered if it's possible to read your Skype chat history without having to be logged into your Skype account? And did you ever wondered if it's possible to read someone else's chat history without having to use Skype client and without knowing Skype account passwords?

The answer of the last few questions is 'Yes' :) Bellow you'll find Skype chat logs format description. I don't pretend that this is a complete Skype chat log format, but this information was enough for me to write a small tool that extract the information from log files and save it in human readable format in simple text file. You can download the first version of my SkypeChatLogReader at the end of this article.

During our work process we are stumbling upon different web developers’ whims. The last thing that surprised me a lot, was the use of $_REQUEST superglobal array in PHP for storing global variables. This is not a good idea, and I'll try to explain to you why.