This repository contains some python scripts that transform an archive of messages into a simple CSV format. Currently, there are scripts for iPhone and Facebook messages.
This article lists the names of various source files on the phone.
To use these scripts, acquire the necessary input files and update the paths in the Makefile to point to them. Then run make in this directory. The resulting CSV files will be written to the output directory.
The scripts were written with Python 2.7.11. They require the following 3rd party libraries (available through pip): beautifulsoup4 and vobject.
To get the text messages from an iPhone, follow these steps:
- Back up the phone through iTunes
- Access the backups at
~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/ - Open the most recent backup folder and find the file named
3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28. This is a sqlite file that contains all the text messages from the phone. - Copy the above file to this directory, or update the path in the
Makefileto point to it.
You will also need a copy of your address book as a vCard. One way to get this is from the Contacts application on the Mac: select all the contacts and choose File > Export... > Export vCard. Save this as Contacts.vcf or update the path in the Makefile to point to it.
Once you have the SMS sqlite file and the Contacts vCard file, run make text to parse the Contacts and cross-reference them with the contents of the SMS file. The result will be a file called txts.csv in the output directory.
To get the facebook messages, download a copy of your Facebook data (as of this writing, this feature is accessed through the General pane of the user settings). Within this archive is a file called messages.htm. Copy that file to this directory, or update the path in the Makefile to point to it.
You will also need an access token to the Facebook Graph API, in order to fill in the missing user names. Get one at https://developers.facebook.com/tools/explorer; the basic permissions are sufficient. Copy it into a file named facebookAccessToken.txt, or point to it in the Makefile.
Finally, update the array in extract_facebook.py to include your name in the various forms it appears in the Facebook message archive file.
Once this setup is done, run make facebook to convert the HTML file to a CSV. The script will call the Graph API to get the actual name for any user who appears in the archive only by ID. This will take a long time; HTML parsing is slow.