rwhatsapp
Motivation
rwhatsapp is a small yet robust package that provides some
infrastructure to work with WhatsApp text data in R.
WhatsApp seems to become increasingly important not just as a messaging
service but also as a social network—thanks to its group chat
capabilities. Furthermore, retrieving chat logs from the Android or iOS
app is very straightforward: Simply choose More in the menu of a chat,
then Export chat and export the history to a txt file.
This package is intended to make the first step of analysing WhatsApp
text data as easy as possible: reading your chat history into R. This
should work, no matter which device or locale you used to retrieve the
txt or zip file containing your conversations.
If you have ideas for what can be useful functions or if you have problems with an existing function, please don’t hesitate to file an issue report.
Installation
install.packages("rwhatsapp")Or install the GitHub version:
remotes::install_github("JBGruber/rwhatsapp")Demo
The package comes with a small sample that you can use to get going.
history <- system.file("extdata", "sample.txt", package = "rwhatsapp")The main function of the package, rwa_read() can handle txt (and
zip) files directly, which means that you can simply provide the path
to a file to get started:
library("rwhatsapp")
chat <- rwa_read(history)
chat
#> # A tibble: 9 x 6
#> time author text source emoji emoji_name
#> <dttm> <fct> <chr> <chr> <lis> <list>
#> 1 2017-07-12 22:35:56 <NA> "Messages to th… /home/johannes… <NUL… <NULL>
#> 2 2017-07-12 22:35:56 <NA> "You created gr… /home/johannes… <NUL… <NULL>
#> 3 2017-07-12 22:35:56 Johanne… "<Media omitted… /home/johannes… <NUL… <NULL>
#> 4 2017-07-12 22:35:56 Johanne… "Fruit bread wi… /home/johannes… <chr… <chr [2]>
#> 5 2017-07-13 09:12:56 Test "It's fun doing… /home/johannes… <NUL… <NULL>
#> 6 2017-07-13 09:16:56 Johanne… "Haha it sure i… /home/johannes… <chr… <chr [1]>
#> 7 2018-09-28 13:27:56 Johanne… "Did you know t… /home/johannes… <NUL… <NULL>
#> 8 2018-09-28 13:28:56 Johanne… "