What does Facebook give me in this zip archive?

Facebook gives you literally everything you’ve ever posted to Facebook, which includes your pictures, videos, posts. etc in addition to your chat messages.

Your chat history comes in a single HTML page titled messages.htm. Unfortunately, the data is mostly unordered and impossible to load into your web browser (it can be several hundred megabytes in size). You’re essentially forced to parse it if you want to analyze the content.

Why would I ever want my Facebook chat history?

There are a number of reasons you may want to parse your Facebook chat history:

1. To make a simulation of your friends using Markov chains.

2. You’re deleting your Facebook account, but would like a record of your conversations.

3. You need to analyze a copy of your conversations for legal reasons.

How do I get it?

Install the Facebook Chat Archive Parser via pip under at least Python 2.7:

pip install fbchat-archive-parser

How does it work?

Simply run the command fbcap in your terminal with your messages.htm file as the argument.

fbcap ./messages.htm

And watch as the parser sifts through your data!

When it’s done, it will dump all your conversation history is dumped to stdout. Obviously, this can be very long, so here is an example:

What if I want JSON?

Simply supply the -f json option to the command line:

fbcap ./messages.htm -f json

The output format is as follows:

Messages are ordered from oldest to newest.

{
    "threads": [
        {
            "participants": ["participant_0", "...", "participant_n"],
            "messages": [
                {
                    "date": "ISO 8601 formatted date",
                    "sender": "sender name",
                    "message": "message text"
                },
                "..."
            ]
        },
        "..."
    ]
}

How about CSV?

Of course!

fbcap ./messages.htm -f csv

thread,sender,date,message
Third User,Third User,2013-10-04T15:05Z,1
Third User,Third User,2013-10-04T15:05Z,2
Third User,Third User,2013-10-04T15:05Z,3
Third User,First User,2013-10-04T15:05Z,4
Third User,Third User,2013-10-04T15:06Z,5
Third User,First User,2013-10-04T15:07Z,6
Third User,First User,2013-10-04T15:07Z,7
Second User,Second User,2013-10-04T15:04Z,X Y Z
Second User,Second User,2013-10-04T15:05Z,X? Y Z!
Second User,Second User,2013-10-04T15:05Z,This is a test
Second User,Second User,2013-10-04T15:05Z,"Yes, it is"
Second User,Second User,2013-10-04T15:05Z,The last message!
"Second User, Third User",Third User,2013-10-04T15:05Z,1
"Second User, Third User",Third User,2013-10-04T15:05Z,2
...

What about that YAML thing the kids these days are talking about?

For sure!

fbcap ./messages.htm -f yaml

user: First User
threads:
- participants:
  - Second User
  - Third User
  messages:
  - date: 2013-10-04T22:05-07:00
    message: '1'
    sender: Third User
  - date: 2013-10-04T22:05-07:00
    message: '2'
    sender: Third User
  - date: 2013-10-04T22:05-07:00
    message: '3'
    sender: Third User
...

What if I want to see some statistics?

See who you talk to the most among your friends and how much each of you contribute to the conversation.

fbcap ./messages.htm -f stats

How do I get any of the above into a file?

Just use standard file redirects.

fbcap ./messages.html > my_file.txt

What if I only want to parse out a specific conversation?

You can use the -t option to specify a particular conversation/thread you want to output. Just provide a comma-separated set of names. If you don’t remember a last name (or conversely, only remember the last name), the system will try to compensate.

fbcap ./messages.html -t second

fbcap ./messages.html -t second,third