Create html output by date (not an issue)

[deadbone]

Hi,

First at all, thank you for your script, it's very easy to use :) I've just a question : would it be very difficult to create output by date (many files) instead just one ? I'm a noob with python :)

Regards

[automaciej]

Is the idea that you would get a single HTML file from multiple .txt files? I could change the script arguments to something like:

./whatsapp_archive.py -o output.html input1.txt input2.txt input3.txt input4.txt ...

But in the meantime, perhaps you could concatenate / join the .txt files and feed them to the script as if they were one file?

[deadbone]

Hello, No, it's the opposite ;) I've a huge export with many and many days of chat. And it would be easier to read many smaller file by date.

Example with a chat.txt which contains chats from 2019-10-29 and 2019-10-30 ./whatsapp_archive.py -I chat.txt -o output -s

Will provide :

output-2019-10-29.html output-2019-10-30.html

The "-s" argument would be optional

Sorry if my explanation was not accurate :)

[automaciej]

What's the larger goal here? By splitting the archive into separate files, you're solving a problem. What problem is it?

[deadbone]

The archive is one big file with many and many days of conversation. What I want to do is to have at the end with a script, to format a chat (like with your script) but obtain one file a day. And like I wrote in the title, it’s not a issue with your script, juste an idea of option. You seems to know python a way more of me, it’s why I asked if you think if it’s possible to do. Sorry to bother you with that :)

[automaciej]

@deadbone Right, this sounds like functionality on the formatting side. But… I'm still smelling the XY problem here, what is the reason that you want each day in a separate file? Is the complete export too large and your computer freezes up? Is the scroll bar too small? Or you want a way to jump to a given date? Or something else?

[deadbone]

Hi, Yes I would like to jump to a specific date easily. So I thought a split by day per file would be a good answer but if you have a better alternative, I’m in :-)

[automaciej]

HTML already has functionality for jumping around: links!

A list of days on top of the file (like a TOC) would allow you to jump to a specific date.

TOC

2019-11-29 (link) 2019-11-30 (link) 2019-12-01 (link)

2019-11-29

Alice: So how have you been? …

2019-11-30

Bob: (…) (…)

How does that look?

[deadbone]

Hi It would be great :-) Regards

[deadbone]

By the Way, thanks for the link about the XY problem

[automaciej]

I took a stab at it this weekend, but didn't manage to finish it.