THIS NO LONGER WORKS BECAUSE FACEBOOK UPDATED THEIR EXPORT SCHEMA TO SOMETHING USEFUL. IT IS INCLUDED HERE ONLY FOR HISTORY’S SAKE.

Facebook-Messenger-Export

Purpose

A C# project to take the message export Facebook gives and turn it into something more machine readable. Might extend to creating a frontend for reading them. Maybe.

Hierarchy of Export (message.htm file)

• Start in the div .contents
• It apparently has several divs in it for some fucking reason (probably related to health of the DOM)
• Each chat has a div for it with class .thread
  • For some fucking reason this starts with a basic plain string (no <p> tag) that has a list of all users
• It then continues with a bunch of divs with class .message.
  • Spoiler: these don’t fucking include the messages
  • Instead they contain a div of class .message_header
  • Within this div, there’s 2 spans. One with class .user and the other with class .meta
    • User has the user’s information. Sometimes this takes the form of a real name. Other times this takes the form of ID@facebook.com. Going to facebook.com/ID will take you to their profile.
    • Meta has the date in this format: Monday, December 12, 2016 at 1:51pm CST
• After the div of class .message, there’s a (classless) <p> tag with the actual plaintext of the mssage
  • I’m pretty convinced images aren’t here at all.
  • Can’t blame Facebook for that one - they can’t expose them to the world via their CDN and the processing (+ raw size) of the export would be ridiculous if they were included
    • Still would like links that could be accessed by people with actual auth :/

Getting Long Lived Facebook Token

Follow instructions here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17197970/facebook-permanent-page-access-token

License

MIT