Facebook lets you download an archive of all your information, including all your messages (by going to "Settings" -> "Download a copy of your Facebook data"). Unfortunately, the messages are all stored in one ungodly huge HTML file, combining messages from ALL your friends. As a bonus, the messages are not necessarily in chronological order. Are you kidding me?

fbmsgsplit is a simple python script I hacked up to split the messages file into nicely formatted HTML files separated by user and in chronological order. I roughly based the chat log formatting on the chat logs from the Pidgin IM client. This script works quite well for me, but I have not done extensive testing and your mileage may vary.

• Python 3 (I'm fairly certain Python 2 could work with minimal changes)
• BeautifulSoup 4 (Install with pip install beautifulsoup4 or your preferred package manager)

fbmsgsplit.py messages.htm --output-dir=OUT

where messages.htm is the original message file and OUT is your desired output directory.

By default, the conversation users include your own name. If you would like to remove your name from the generated filenames, use the --prune-users="Your Name,Your second name" flag, where you can specify multiple names separated by commas. You may have multiple names in the chat logs (as I do: my actual name and also [email protected]). This option is recommended.

You can also run

fbmsgsplit.py -l

to show a list of your probable "names". This is just a guess, but should be somewhat accurate, I hope.

As always, the --help flag is available when in doubt.

Make an option to create a new file for each "day", similar to Pidgin's chat logs.

While I have not tested this out personally, I have a feeling that you may run into weird problems if you have chat logs with two friends of the same name, as Facebook's generated chat logs don't distinguish between users with the same name. I don't think there is anything I can do about this on my end.

Do whatever you want with it