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I'm currently running 5.2.x on OS X 10.6.8 and I need to some deep searching of the past history in a conversation with a colleague. Skype tells me the term I'm looking for is in the long-running chat we've had, but good luck getting it to show you the specific chat entry in time without manually scrolling backwards through months and months of back-and-forth.

I'd like to export the conversation as some format I can access programmatically (HTML, XML, etc.). The HTML export options that used to be present in Skype for OS X seem to have disappeared as of the 5.0 release.

Is there a way to export chat history in Skype 5.2.x for OS X?

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If you have the OS X Developer Tools installed you can use this terminal command: 

sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/Skype/<YOUR SKYPENAME>/main.db "SELECT author,timestamp, body_xml FROM messages WHERE dialog_partner = '<OTHER SKYPENAME>'" > ~/Desktop/skype_chat_history.txt
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This is excellent! That you can interface with their DB using sqlite3 is a very good bit of information. Thank you! – Ian C. Sep 21 '11 at 13:58
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It's a complete UI fail that you can't search within a conversation.

This isn't what you're after, but one approach I've taken is to copy and paste the entire conversation into a real editor and search there.

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Actually getting the Skype UI to show me the whole conversation takes...a long, long time. So long I killed it after an hour of watching it spin. But not a bad approach really. – Ian C. Jul 19 '11 at 16:40
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