mikolysz / fbchat2html

A simple utility written in golang to convert facebook chat archives to easily readable, structured html documents.

fbchat2html

fbchat2html is a little utility written in golang to convert chat messages from the facebook archive to readable html documents. It expects a json file generated with the help of another utility, facebook chat archive parser as input. It makes an html file for each conversation it finds and saves it's contents in there. The messages are sorted in chronological order, in contrast to the reverse-chronological order found in the original archive and are split by year, month and day. Years are headings of level two, months are headings of level three, days are headings of level four and message authors are headings of level five. This helps people using screen-reading software such as myself navigate the document more quickly and easily.

Installation:

1. Install golang.
2. Execute the following command: go get github.com/miki123211/fbchat2html
3. Install facebook chat archive parser as written in it's readme.
4. You're ready to go! Binaries for windows, linux and mac coming soon.

Quick start:

1. Generate a facebook archive, you can find instructions on how to do that on facebook's website.
2. Use facebook chat archive parser to generate a json file with your message history, How to do that is described in it's documentation.
3. Open your command prompt, go to the directory containing your json file and execute: fbchat2html your_json_file.json By default, it will create a directory named "output" in your current working directory and place your files there. You can change that by setting the --output parameter on the command line. It will also create a stats.txt file inside that directory containing some useful statistics.

Known issues and limitations:

The readme is not completely done yet, particularly the section on generating the facebook archive. The documentation and comments probably need reviewing by someone with english as their first language or, at least, someone more proficient in english than me. It's impossible to change the name of the stats file. The process of writing the archive probably could be more parallelized to make it a bit faster. The code definitely needs some refactoring, it's pretty hacky at this time but it works! Binaries for various platforms need to be generated, preferrably bundled with fbchat_archive_parser. License issues need to be investigated if I decide to do that.

Contributing and contact:

Feel free to contribute, submit issues or pull requests, or, if you have the need, contact me privately via email at miki one hundred twenty three thousand two hundred and eleven at gmail dot charlie echo mike. Also feel free to reach out via facebook and twitter.

License:

This code is in the public domain, do whatever you want with it without worrying about licenses.