I tried parsing idlelog..log file myself, but found what seemed extra bytes inserted randomly throughout the file. To get to the root of the cause I compiled a part of the code, PacketBuffer and IdleLogManager, and reproduced the issue consistently.

The problem is that the binary stream is being saved to a file that was not opened in binary mode. As a result, Windows inserts a line feed \r before every \n, thus corrupting the logfile.

So basically this piece of code:
ofstream file(ss.str().c_str());
needs to be replaced with something like this:
ofstream file(ss.str().c_str(), ios::binary);

I am not sure if this is the best way to solve this and all the places where this needs to be fixed, but this is a major issue for the Windows platform.

BTW: Thanks a lot for this great app!

Thanks for your report. Is your idlelog..log big? Can you share with us your intentions in parsing the log?

Created attachment 183
Corrupted log sample

Well I am not sure if the log is pretty big, but I think it has about four months worth of data. I guess that's about the maximum it can have.

The idea behind parsing the log is I wanted to see if I could generate some interesting reports/graphs using the raw data. The historystats file doesn't have data by the hour for example which may be interesting to compare historically. Anyway, I was using PHP to parse the file and if all went well make it into a web based script where I could upload the logs and get graphs/reports in return.

Thanks for looking into this.

I added the "ios::binary" and increased the version number of the idlelog. The next release of workrave will first remove old idlelogs.

Thanks!