Need help exporting txt/sms messages from my iphone for court case.

It's time consuming, but you can also take screenshots of the texts, then use those photos. Take a screenshot by pressing the sleep/wake button and home button at the same time and releaseing quickly.

You can find the messages in the phone backup under ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup

There's one directory per device (a long alphanumerical code). Inside each directory is a bunch of files with long alphanumeric names. The file 3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28 is an SQLite database containing all of the text messages in the back-up.

You can dump the text messages like so:

cd '~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/<your phone id>'

sqlite3 -header 3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28 'select * from message;' > ~/Desktop/sms-messages.txt

You should then be able to import into into Excel to print it out nicely. The messages database has the following fields: row number, address, date, text, flags, replace, svc_center, group_id, association_id, height, UIFlags, version, subject, country, headers, recipients, read. Note that 'address' is the source phone number.

There's also these tables in the same database: msg_group, msg_pieces (has things like MMS data), group_member, and _SqliteDatabaseProperties. You can dump them out the same way (the sqlite3 command permits you to specify a couple of options to control the format of the dump).

Two things: 1) there's probably an application that simplifies this process; 2) if the court case is important, it might be worth the effort to have an experienced third-party do this for you.

Third-party software like this:

http://www.wideanglesoftware.com/touchcopy/index.php

I should probably add that you probably need to make sure that you have the "encrypt backup data" feature turned off before you try this.