There are two formats for chat logs (directly quoting the GM from the support ticket I created for this):
-
Copying directly from chat preserves the in-game markup, including
<url=showinfo:...>tags, which contain the full type IDs and entity IDs. -
Saved chat logs (found in your EVE documents folder) use a simplified plain-text format that strips out all markup and only retains the visible display text.
Well, why aren’t the log the same as the in-game chat?
I want the log to reflect the garbage with all possible indirection that was posted in the channel. Also allowing to recover the in-game links so we can correctly see which character was linked without having to go all guesswork and additional API calls.
Same with the trade channels, it’s hard to identify the contracts from the logs. Being able to just recover the contract ID from the chat would save me a lot of polling to retrieve the latest contracts from the eve API. It would reduce the duplication of work as I could just ignore contracts I’ve already seen the ID of.
Hopefully it could be as simple as adding a log level option or a separate log file. Because the alternative at this point seem to manually go select all and copy and then dump it into a parser. Am I’m lazy, we already have saved files on disk. I’d prefer for them to be useful.