Turn a WhatsApp export .txt back into the real chat
The .txt cannot be reopened as a chat — it is a one-way transcript, deliberately lossy. But it holds everything needed to rebuild the conversation on a page: sender, timestamp and text for every line, with the media riding along as files inside the same zip. Re-rendering that file back into bubbles is literally this site’s job — the studio reads the export in your browser and lays it out as the chat again, free to read, nothing uploaded.
What the file actually is
Open _chat.txt and every line has the same shape — a bracketed timestamp, a hyphen, the sender, a colon, then the message:15/03/2024, 21:04 - Thandi: happy birthday you 💛 A parser can split that into its parts without guessing; there is no styling in the file to recover because WhatsApp never wrote any in. The look has to be put back onto the words, which is why every method below is really the same method wearing different clothes.
Kept intact
Every message, full timestamps, sender names, the day markers between them, emoji as real characters (if your font behaves), the text of replies quoted above the message they answer.
Kept, but elsewhere
Photos, videos, stickers, voice notes and documents are not in the .txt — they sit as numbered files in the zip beside it. The transcript just leaves a placeholder where each one was.
Gone for good
Reactions (❤️ under a message), read receipts, typing states, anything from before the last phone transfer, and messages deleted before you exported. No file on earth restores those.
Reading it as text, if you must
- Open it as UTF-8The file is UTF-8. An app that guesses a different encoding turns emoji into garbage — the squares-and-squares problem, and its fixes, live one page over.
- Use something that wrapsNotepad on one long line will make a 40 000-message chat feel like scroll punishment. Any real text editor, or a browser window with the file dragged in, soft-wraps and is searchable.
- Search, don't readThe transcript's one superpower over the chat itself: Ctrl-F across years of words. Find the phrase, note the date beside it, jump back into the app or the render at that point.
Reading it as the chat again
A renderer re-typesets the transcript: sender to the correct side, bubbles, day breaks into headings, and the media files from the zip slotted back where their placeholders stand. That is the whole of the studio here — paste or drop the export, watch the book assemble in the browser, read every page free. If what you actually wanted was a PDF of the conversation, that is the same journey in one step more, and it ends in a file a print shop can bind.
Questions people actually ask
Can I import the .txt back into WhatsApp?
No, and no third party can either. WhatsApp's export is one-way by design; the only thing that restores a chat inside WhatsApp is a backup made before it was lost. The .txt can be re-rendered onto a page, which is a different — and more permanent — kind of keeping.
Why do the names sometimes show as numbers?
In group exports a participant who has left, or a business account, can appear as a raw phone number because that is all the file holds. A renderer can only show what the export kept.
Does the render include the photos?
If you exported with media, yes — the images live in the same zip and are placed on the page where they were sent. Exported without media, the placeholders are all any renderer will ever see.
Is my upload safe?
On this site there is no upload to keep safe: parsing and layout happen in your own browser, and the files are gone when the tab is.
The conversation, rebuilt from its own transcript.
Open the studio — freeThis is one of the guides — or see everything we’ve written.