WhatsApp Chat Formatter

When a chat is exported from Whatsapp, the output is a zip folder with a txt file.

This GitHub repo changes the exported chat of a group or direct message of WhatsApp from an unreadable txt file to a csv file with the following columns: date, time, name, and message. The formatted csv file can be used for data analysis purposes.

In main.py there are two functions: open_txt_file(filename) and format_data(data). The first function takes in a string which is the name of the txt file with the exported chat and returns a list with lists that each have a line of the conversation. The second function takes in what is returned from open_txt_file(filename) which is a list with lists that each have a line of the conversation and returns a pandas DataFrame with four columns: date, time, name, message where each row of the DataFrame contains a single message.

To run the file, run the following in the terminal: python3 main.py directory_path filename where directory_path is the path to the directory where filename is located. The common filename is _chat.txt. A new file will be created in the directory_path directory named {filename}_formatted.csv which contains the result of formatting the txt file into a readable csv.

The source code can be found here.