Facebook Archive Message Reverser

What is this?

This is a script developed by a friend and myself for a personal project that takes the entire messages.htm file from your Facebook archive (as of October 2015) and reverses the message order from descending to ascending.

The Facebook message archive file presents you with groups of messages (when no CSS is used) approximately like this:

Tom Smith, Bob Smith

Tom SmithSaturday, 17 October 2015 at 12:45 EDT

Hi Bob, I received your third message.

Bob SmithSaturday, 17 October 2015 at 12:44 EDT

Hey Tom, this is the third message I am sending.

Tom SmithSaturday, 17 October 2015 at 12:43 EDT

Hi Bob, I received your second message.

Bob SmithSaturday, 17 October 2015 at 12:42 EDT

Hey Tom, this is the second message I am sending.

Tom SmithSaturday, 17 October 2015 at 12:41 EDT

Hi Bob, I received your first message.

Bob SmithSaturday, 17 October 2015 at 12:40 EDT

Hey Tom, this is the first message I am sending.

However, the Python script rearranges the messages to look like this:

Bob SmithSaturday, 17 October 2015 at 12:40 EDT

Hey Tom, this is the first message I am sending.

Tom SmithSaturday, 17 October 2015 at 12:41 EDT

Hi Bob, I received your first message.

Bob SmithSaturday, 17 October 2015 at 12:42 EDT

Hey Tom, this is the second message I am sending.

Tom SmithSaturday, 17 October 2015 at 12:43 EDT

Hi Bob, I received your second message.

Bob SmithSaturday, 17 October 2015 at 12:44 EDT

Hey Tom, this is the third message I am sending.

Tom SmithSaturday, 17 October 2015 at 12:45 EDT

Hi Bob, I received your third message.

Tom Smith, Bob Smith

Requirements:

• Python 2.7 (Other versions may work fine, but are untested by me)
• BeautifulSoup 4.4.1 (Other versions may work fine, but are untested by me)
• messages.htm file (html\messages.htm) from your Facebook archive.

How to run:

1. Make sure BeautifulSoup is installed.
2. Place your messages.htm file in the same directory as the parser.py file.
3. From the command line in that directory run python parser.py messages.htm
4. The script will now create (or re-create if run again) a messages_reversed.html file in the same directory containing your reversed messages.
5. After a while, depending on the size of your messages, the command line will output the message done when it has completed. Now your messages should be reversed.

Things to note about the Facebook archive:

• Conversations from Facebook in the archive are currently split up into threads.
• These threads are limited to 20,000 messages before they are split up into other threads.
• The downloaded archive does not guarantee that these threads (or groups of messages with an individual) are in the correct order and they could be divided by other conversations.
• Facebook message archives do not currently show emoticons.

Things to note about the script:

• Any Unicode characters in the Facebook message archive will be re-encoded (and possibly removed) as UTF-8.
• While the HTML file is no longer directly linked to the CSS sheet, the HTML tags were left alone if one wanted to introduce a style to it later. (I did this to make it easier to copy the messages from this archive into a document).
• This is a bare-bones script whose primary purpose is to solely reverse large quantities of messages. It is not meant to re-create the archive file.
• Depending on how many messages you have, this may take a while to run. My Facebook message archive was around 20 MB in size. This took 5-10 minutes to complete on my desktop.
• Every time the script runs it will remove and re-create the messages_reversed.html.