whatsapp2md

Parses whatsapp chat exports and generates a document.

Note: the format of the exported chats has been changing since I wrote this
project, and currently it may not work with some versions.

You can export a whatsapp chat by means of option More → Export Chat in the chat's menu, and choose to send it by email to yourself (including images).

This gives you a text file with the messages in the chat plus a number of image files (whatsapp2md does not support other type of documents).

This simple python script can take the whatsapp chat export and generate a markdown file (.md) with the contents of the chat.

You can then use your favourite markdown viewer to print the it to PDF to get a self-contained document that you can archive or share.

You can find an example of a generated markdown printed to pdf here.

Technical details

whatsapp2md is a python3 script with no dependencies. Just clone the repository and invoke it, passing the chat text file as command line argument.

python3 whatsapp2md.py ../chat/chat.txt > ../chat/chat.md

The complete command line interface can be checked invoking it with --help:

usage: Whatsapp chat export parser into markdown [-h] [--hide-days]
                                                 [--show-sender]
                                                 [--hide-timestamp]
                                                 chat_file

positional arguments:
  chat_file         Chat text file

optional arguments:
  -h, --help        show this help message and exit
  --hide-days       Hides the day headers
  --show-sender     Shows the sender of each message
  --hide-timestamp  Hides message timestamps

FAQ

Why my markdown file does not show my images?

whatsapp2md assumes your image files are in the same directory as the markdown file. Probably your .md file is in a different folder than the images.

My chat text file is not properly parsed, what to do?

Whatsapp chat exports use different formats for dates and times depending on your phone configuration. Most probably whatsapp2md does not support your configuration. Open an issue with an example chat export text file along with information about which language your phone is configured in. We will try to support it.