How to open the _chat.txt file from a WhatsApp export
It is an ordinary text file inside an ordinary zip. Extract the zip first — do not read it from inside the preview window — then open _chat.txt with Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac. It will work, and it will also be almost unreadable, which is not your fault: the file is a transcript, not a conversation.
Getting it out of the zip
- Windows: right-click the .zip → Extract AllThen open the folder that appears. Do not double-click the zip and read the txt from the preview window — Windows opens it read-only from a temporary location, the photos alongside it are not really there, and anything you drag out of that view arrives without its media.
- Mac: double-click the .zipmacOS extracts to a folder beside it automatically. Open that folder, not the archive.
- iPhone: Files app → tap the zipiOS extracts in place. The folder will contain
_chat.txtand every attachment as a separate file. - Open the .txtNotepad, TextEdit, VS Code, anything. If your chat is long, Notepad will be slow — that is Notepad, not the file.
Reading a line
Every message is one line, and the two platforms punctuate them differently. This is the single most useful thing to understand about the file, because once you can see the pattern the wall of text stops being a wall:
| Part | iPhone export | Android export |
|---|---|---|
| Date and time | [2026/03/14, 21:07:33] | 2026/03/14, 21:07 – |
| Wrapping | Square brackets around both | No brackets; an en-dash before the sender |
| Sender | Amara: | Amara: |
| An attachment | ‹attached: 00001-PHOTO.jpg› | IMG-20260314-WA0001.jpg (file attached) |
| A missing one | image omitted | <Media omitted> |
Date order varies by the phone’s region — day-first in most of the world, month-first in the US — which is why a naive reader gets 3 April and 4 March confused. Anything that parses these properly has to detect the order rather than assume it.
The invisible characters
iOS exports sprinkle an invisible left-to-right mark (U+200E) in front of system lines and attachment lines. You will never see it, but it is why a line that looks identical to another behaves differently in a spreadsheet, and why pasting the file into some tools produces a stray box character at the start of a row. It is a formatting hint, not corruption — leave it alone.
Why the emoji became boxes
The file is UTF-8, which can carry every emoji, every accent and every script. If you are seeing ð soup or empty rectangles, the editor opened it as something else — usually Windows-1252. In Notepad, reopen and pick UTF-8 in the encoding dropdown. In VS Code, click the encoding in the status bar and Reopen with Encoding → UTF-8. Nothing is damaged; it is being read in the wrong alphabet.
What is not in the file at all
- Deleted messages. If it was deleted for everyone, it is gone from the export too — you get the tombstone line, not the words.
- Disappearing and “view once” messages. Never written to the transcript.
- Reactions. The little emoji on a bubble are not exported.
- Who read what, and when. No blue-tick data leaves the app.
- Profile photos and wallpapers. Not in the zip; only the attachments people sent.
- Media older than your phone kept. If a photo was cleared from local storage, the line stays and the file does not. That specific disappointment has its own guide.
Making it readable
A text editor can open the file; it cannot make it a conversation. There is no left and right, no bubbles, no grouping, and a timestamp in front of every single line — which is precisely why a chat that was lovely to live through reads like a server log. Your options, honestly ranked, are in turning a WhatsApp chat into a PDF — three ways compared. The one we make puts it back into bubbles and prints it: drop the zip into the studio and read the whole thing, in its own colours, for nothing.
Questions people actually ask
Is _chat.txt safe to open?
Yes. It is plain text — there is no code in it and nothing to execute. The zip alongside it contains your own photos and voice notes and nothing else.
Why is my emoji showing as question marks or boxes?
The file is UTF-8 and your editor opened it as something else. Reopen it choosing UTF-8 explicitly — in Notepad from the encoding dropdown, in VS Code by clicking the encoding in the status bar. The file itself is fine.
Can I open a WhatsApp export in Excel?
You can import it, but it will fight you: messages containing a comma or a line break split across cells, and the invisible left-to-right marks on iOS lines confuse the column detection. It works better as a text file than as a spreadsheet.
The txt is there but all the photos say 'image omitted'.
You exported without media. Export the chat again and choose 'Attach Media' on iPhone or 'Include media' on Android; the result will be a zip rather than a lone txt.
Why does the file start in the middle of my history?
WhatsApp caps exports at 40,000 messages, or 10,000 when media is attached, counting backwards from the most recent. Longer chats are trimmed at the old end with no warning.
Or skip the text editor entirely.
See your chat as a book — freeThis is one of the guides — or see everything we’ve written.