Cleaning Up an Exported WhatsApp Conversation
WhatsApp will hand you your conversation as a text file, which sounds like the job is already done. Open
it and you find otherwise. Every line carries a timestamp in a format that depends on the phone it came
from. The first line is a notice about encryption. Scattered through the rest are group joins, subject
changes, deleted-message markers, and — if the chat had any pictures — a great many lines that say
<Media omitted> and nothing else.
This page turns that into a readable conversation. Drop in the .txt, or the .zip
WhatsApp wraps it in, and the result appears here. The file is read in this browser tab and is never
uploaded.
Getting the Export Out of WhatsApp
On both iPhone and Android: open the chat, tap the contact or group name at the top, scroll to Export Chat, and choose Without Media. The media option attaches every photo and voice note, which produces an archive hundreds of times larger and adds nothing to a text transcript — the messages themselves are identical either way.
The result is a file named _chat.txt, usually inside a .zip, delivered through
whatever share sheet you pick. Both the loose text file and the zip work here.
Why the Timestamp Format Is the Hard Part
There is no single WhatsApp export format. There are at least two message shapes and an open-ended number of date formats, and which you get depends on the operating system and the phone's region settings.
iOS writes the timestamp in square brackets: [12/03/2024, 14:23:01] Name: message. Android
writes it bare, separated from the message by a dash:
12/03/2024, 14:23 - Name: message. Seconds may or may not be present. The clock may be
24-hour or 12-hour with AM and PM. The date may be day-first, month-first or year-first. Separators may be
slashes, dots or hyphens.
The parser accepts both message shapes and matches the date loosely, capturing the timestamp without
trying to interpret it as a calendar date. That last decision is deliberate: 03/12/2024 is
the third of December to most of the world and the twelfth of March in the United States, and there is
nothing in the file that says which. Guessing would silently misdate half of everyone's transcript.
The original string is shown as WhatsApp wrote it, which is unambiguous to the person who was there.
Multi-Line Messages
A message with line breaks in it — a list, an address, a long paragraph someone broke up — appears in the export as one timestamped line followed by continuation lines with no timestamp and no marker. There is no delimiter. The only signal is the absence of a timestamp.
Any line that does not begin with a recognisable timestamp is therefore attached to the message above it. This is the correct reading and it explains a failure mode you may have seen in simpler scripts: split the file on newlines and you get orphaned fragments attributed to nobody, with addresses and lists scattered through the transcript as if they were separate messages.
What the Filters Remove
By default, two categories go, and switches bring either back:
- System notices. The encryption message at the top, "X added Y", "X left", "You deleted this message", subject and icon changes, security code notifications, missed call records. In an active group these can outnumber actual messages by a wide margin.
- Media placeholders.
<Media omitted>, the localised variants like "image omitted" and "audio omitted", and the(file attached)suffix. In a chat where people mostly send photos, this is the majority of the lines and none of them carry content.
Keep the media lines if the pattern of when things were sent is part of what you are looking at. Keep the system notices if you need a record of who joined a group and when. Otherwise both are noise, and removing them typically halves the file.
What People Use This For
Keeping a copy of a conversation before leaving a group or changing phones. Preparing a chat as evidence, where a clean readable transcript is considerably more use than a raw log. Feeding a long thread to a model to summarise a decision that got made somewhere in three hundred messages. Searching years of messages for a detail nobody wrote down anywhere else. Turning a family group's history into something printable.
The Privacy Point Is Not Decorative
WhatsApp messages are end-to-end encrypted in transit. The moment you export one, that protection is over: the file on your phone is plain text, readable by anything you hand it to. Uploading it to a web converter undoes the entire point of the encryption that carried it.
Nothing here is uploaded. The parser is JavaScript running in this tab; your export is read by the browser, converted in memory, and displayed. No server sees it, so there is no retention policy to read and no deletion request to file. Close the tab and it is gone.
Exports from other platforms work on the general chat export page, which detects the format automatically.