My memory may be fooling me, but I think I remember that my girl's N9 acted up some time ago displaying no messages in "Messages". From a backup (might be stock Backup, might be rsync, I don't remember) I saw that the SMS were stored in a sqlite file. I could confirm from a dump that her messages were all there. In the end, we didn't need it as the N9 got its act together again.

With that in mind, why do we need a binary tool at all? Also, having the dump as SQL takes care of character escaping and multiline messages automatically. It shouldn't even matter whether the messages were originally SMS, Facebook or Skype, or whatever.

Or did I dream it all up?