Facebook – Download Facebook Messenger thread (on Mac)

facebook-messenger

I would like to download a very long Facebook Messenger thread to my computer for safekeeping (I’m on Mac if it makes any difference). Any way to do this easily?

I’m no computer wiz.

Best Answer

Ask for an archive from Facebook via your personal settings (Download a copy of your Facebook data.). This is the simplest way.

Any further needs programming and is beyond the scope of Web Apps.

Related Solutions

Facebook – download chat history

Unfortunately your solutions might be the best ones, although if you are using Chrome, there might be a way to use the Inspect Element dashboard to pull the chat text.

Right-click on the chat window and select Inspect Element. You will see all of the rendered tags from the page, and the chat messages will appear there, all with the class:

<div class="fbChatMessage fsm direction_ltr" data-jsid="message">This is a chat message in the window</div>

To get the entire conversation, look for:

<table class="uiGrid conversationContainer" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" >

Then Right-Click > Copy as HTML - You can then paste the entire chat table into another file and parse it (eg using regex)

Facebook – Log Facebook chat conversations

Facebook Help Centre says:

Download your info and get a history of the conversations you’ve had on Facebook Chat (a complete history is available directly from your messages inbox).

Some other options:

There is a Chrome extension called Messages Saver for Facebook. You can choose whether to save your chat as just text, then only text messages will be saved, or as an .html file with all smileys, emoji, pictures and other files that you sent in your chat. Or even as a zip file with all the files of your chat saved locally to your computer.
There is a Firefox extension called FB Chat History Manager.
If you use an Android device, there's an app called Message Backup for Facebook. Log in to Facebook through the app, go to the conversation and download it. It would be saved in .CSV file.
Here is a python script to download Facebook chats.
Here is another Python script for Facebook scraper and parser.