How do you convert the iChat transcript files that Messages creates into human-readable text files that can be opened without the Messages app?
For reference, these are the conversation files located in ~/Library/Messages/Archive.
Simply opening the .ichat files in a text editor includes a bunch of additional strings and hashes. Opening them in Messages and copy-pasting into a text editor works, but I'd prefer to automate the process if possible.
The files that Messages saves have an ichat file extension.
But from the command line you can inspect them to see they are actually binary plist files:
$ file transcript.ichat
transcript.ichat: Apple binary property list
Turns out, you can easily convert binary plist files into human-readable XML documents:
$ plutil -convert xml1 transcript.ichat
Now, when you run file again, you can see it's an XML file:
$ file transcript.ichat
transcript.ichat: XML document text
Go ahead—open it and see for yourself:
$ open transcript.ichat
If you are familiar with sqlite, you can just export the messages directly from the database on Mountain Lion iMessage.
sqlite3 /Users/(username)/Library/Messages/chat.db
From the database, you can send sql commands to get any and all messages and associated fields you have interest. Further, you can change the output settings to write directly to a file.
Also, in addition to the database, all photos are stored in the Attachments folder.
.ichat files) are not SQLite databases.
Commented
Apr 29, 2015 at 15:55
Check out my project that will take all of your conversations and convert them into one readable text file. It won't convert just a single iMessage, but it will collect all of your messages and attachments, back them up, and put them into a human-readable format.
I've created a command line tool for converting these ichat files to newline-separated JSON
The tool extracts the bare essential information: message, sender, date
You can view the source code and/or download binary at https://github.com/kfatehi/ichat2json
For those with folders full of .ichat files on their hands, whether or not they're part of ~/Library/Messages, my project will instantly convert those to RTF or plain-text format: https://github.com/Amethyst-Software/convert-ichat-files (pre-built binary is provided). Basic messages as well as file transfer messages (not the files themselves) and chat client events are translated to text. Group chats are supported as well.
I've created an app called "Past for iChat" to do this (open iChats/Chat logs on macOS 11+ and export them in various formats): https://zeezide.de/en/products/past/
If you select print from the file menus, when the print box opens in the lower left is a pdf button with a drop down. From here you can save as pdf, post script, mail as pdf or send to iTunes.
This wouldn't be a perfect solution, but I notice that the messages are always between Ä_ and _$. You could write a script to extract all the text which started and ended with those characters. (any language with rexex support would do)
This seems like an ideal application of Automator workflows or AppleScript, since both of those can do "press buttons onscreen" style behavior. You'd say "take file as input," and use something under "print" or "messages" if there are either of those, or use AppleScript to tell it to open the file and press file and print and save as pdf and then close the file.
