About this tool
WhatsApp can export any chat as a text file, with or without its media, and that file is often all that survives a phone change that did not carry the history over — or exactly what you need to keep as a record of a dispute with a landlord or at work. The export is readable but awkward: one long .txt with a timestamp on every line. This page turns it back into a chat. Drop the .txt, the zip from an export with media, or the extracted folder; messages appear in bubbles with date separators, system notices (the encryption notice, someone joining or leaving, a renamed group) dimmed, and a search box and a jump-to-date control above. Pick who “you” are from the participant list — the page proposes the person with the most messages, and you can change it.
How the lines are read
iPhone and Android write the export differently — the bracketed [date time] name: message form, with an invisible left-to-right mark (U+200E) at the start of each line, on one; date, time - name: message on the other — and the date order, 12- or 24-hour clock and AM/PM words change with the phone's language. The page detects the platform and format from the file itself. These patterns were assumed from public descriptions rather than taken from a specification, so an export that looks different is reported rather than silently misread. A line that does not start like a message is treated as the continuation of the previous one, which is how multi-line messages survive, and a single malformed line affects only itself. When day and month cannot be told apart — every date in the file has both fields at 12 or below — the page asks you to choose rather than guess, with your browser's convention as the default. Timestamps are shown exactly as WhatsApp wrote them, because the export carries no time zone.
Media and attachments
When the export includes media, the markers WhatsApp leaves in the text — <attached: …> on iPhone, … (file attached) on Android — are matched to the files in the zip or folder, and photos, videos and voice notes are shown and played right in the conversation, straight from the file. Where the referenced file is missing, or the export was made without media and the text only says the media was omitted, the message says so instead. Voice notes play but are not transcribed; for a transcript, the subtitle tool on this site (/video-subtitles) can take the audio file.
Search and statistics
Search is a plain substring match over every message, lower-cased and NFKC-normalised, so names and words in Chinese or Japanese match without word segmentation; a result jumps to the message and highlights it. The statistics view gives each participant's message and word count, a 24-hour histogram of when the chat is busiest, and messages per month. That is where it stops: there is no sentiment analysis and no “who likes whom more” reading. Counting is all it does.
Saving as Markdown or CSV
The conversation can be saved as a Markdown file, or as a CSV with one row per message — time, sender, text and attachment file name — quoted to RFC 4180 so it opens cleanly in a spreadsheet. The Markdown footer records that the file was converted from a WhatsApp export without modification, together with the SHA-256 of the original, so a copy can be checked against the export it came from. There is no PDF export on this page; to print, open the Markdown in any editor and print from there.
What the export leaves out
WhatsApp's own export usually drops things: polls, emoji reactions, edit history, which message a reply was quoting and view-once content are generally not in the text file, and the app caps how many messages one export holds — the limit differs with and without media. This page cannot show what was never exported. It is also not a backup tool: what you see here cannot be put back into WhatsApp. Everything is processed in this tab's memory and gone when you close it; nothing is uploaded or stored. WhatsApp is a trademark of its owner; this is an independent viewer for the files it exports, not an official tool.