How to export a WhatsApp chat

On Android

1. 1.Open the conversation you want to export.
2. 2.Tap the three dots (⋮) in the top right.
3. 3.Go to "More".
4. 4.Tap "Export chat".
5. 5.Choose "Without media".
6. 6.Pick where to save it or who to send it to. Google Drive or emailing it to yourself are the easiest.

On iPhone

1. 1.Open the conversation.
2. 2.Tap the contact or group name at the top.
3. 3.Scroll to the bottom of the screen.
4. 4.Tap "Export Chat".
5. 5.Choose "Without Media".
6. 6.Pick where to save it: Files, Mail, or whichever app you prefer.

With media or without?

Choose "Without media" almost every time. The difference is large:

• Without media: a single .txt file, a few megabytes, with every message. Exports in seconds.
• With media: a .zip containing every photo, voice note, and video in the chat. It can run to hundreds of megabytes and take a long time.

If you want to read or analyze the conversation, the .txt is enough — photos still show up, marked as omitted.

What's inside the file

A .txt with one line per message: date, time, sender, and what they said. Files that weren't exported appear marked as omitted. It won't include deleted messages or anything no longer on your phone.

What the file looks like inside

Each message takes one line with the date, time, sender, and text. The exact format depends on the phone: Android writes the date, a dash, and the name; iPhone puts the date in square brackets.

Date order varies too. Most of the world uses day/month/year; the US uses month/day/year. And the time can come in 24-hour format or with AM and PM, depending on the phone's settings.

Multi-line messages take several lines in the file: only the first one carries a date and name.

What the export does NOT include

Worth knowing before drawing conclusions from an exported chat:

• ·Deleted messages don't appear, neither yours nor theirs.
• ·Messages lost when switching phones aren't there either: the export comes from what's on the device, not from a server.
• ·Reactions to messages aren't exported.
• ·Expired disappearing messages are gone.
• ·Edits aren't recorded — you get the final version only.

Size and time

Without media, a year of one-on-one chat usually lands between 1 and 5 MB and exports in seconds. An active group spanning several years can reach 20 MB and is still fast.

With media it depends entirely on how many photos and voice notes are in there. A three-year family group can pass a gigabyte and take a while, and on phones low on free space the export can fail outright.

You can't do it from a computer

Neither WhatsApp Web nor the desktop app has an export option: it has to happen on the phone. What you can do is send the file to yourself — by email, through Drive, or by saving it to your own chat — and open it on the computer afterwards.

If you exported with media, what arrives is a .zip. Unzip it and look for the one file ending in .txt: that's the chat. The photos and voice notes sitting next to it aren't needed to read it or to analyze it.

Exporting a group

Same procedure, but the file differs. System messages — who joined, who left, who renamed the group — show up as lines with no author. If someone left the group, their earlier messages are still in the export.

Do they know you exported the chat?

No. Exporting is a local operation on your phone: it sends no notification and leaves no trace in the conversation. Nobody else has any way of knowing.

Common problems

Now what?

You can open it in any text editor, or upload it here to see the stats for that conversation: who talks most, who takes longest to reply, and who always starts. It runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded to a server.