Render WeChat Messages from Android

安卓微信消息记录分析工具

WeChat, as the most popular mobile IM app in China, doesn't provide any methods to read its message history. Customers are not able to analyze their own chat messages or interact with other data analysis tools.

We provide this tool that can parse WeChat messages from a rooted android phone. This is necessary to provide interoperability between WeChat messages and other message analysis tools. As examples, we provide sample scripts to obtain statistics of the message history and render the messages into self-contained html files including voice messages, images, emojis, videos, etc. Users can also write custom programs based on this tool to manage their chat messages.

The tool is last verified to work with latest version of WeChat on 2025/01/01. If the tool works for you, please take a moment to add your phone/OS to the wiki.

How to use:

Dependencies:

• adb and rooted android phone connected to a Linux/Mac OSX/Win10+Bash.
• Python >= 3.8
• sox (command line tools)
• Silk audio decoder (included; build it with ./third-party/compile_silk.sh)
• Other python dependencies: pip install -r requirements.txt.

Get Necessary Data:

1. Pull database file and (for older WeChat versions) avatar index:

• Automatic: ./android-interact.sh db. It may use an incorrect userid.
• Manual:
  • Figure out your ${userid} by inspecting the contents of /data/data/com.tencent.mm/MicroMsg on the root filesystem of the device. It should be a 32-character-long name consisting of hexadecimal digits.
  • Get /data/data/com.tencent.mm/MicroMsg/${userid}/EnMicroMsg.db from the device.

2. Decode EnMicroMsg.db. We do not provide instructions to do that.

3. Copy the unencrypted WeChat user resource directory /data/data/com.tencent.mm/MicroMsg/${userid}/{avatar,emoji,image2,sfs,video,voice2} from the phone to the resource directory:

   • ./android-interact.sh res
   • Change RES_DIR in the script if the location of these directories is different on your phone. For older version of WeChat, the directory may be /mnt/sdcard/tencent/MicroMsg/
   • This can take a while. It can be faster to first archive it with tar with or without compression, and then copy the archive, busybox tar is recommended as the Android system's tar may choke on long paths.
   • In the end, we need a resource directory with the following subdir: avatar,emoji,image2,sfs,video,voice2.

4. (Optional) Install and start a WXGF decoder server on an android device. Without this, certain WXGF images will not be rendered or will be rendered in low resolution. See WXGFDecoder for instructions.

5. (Optional) Download the emoji cache from here and decompress it under wechat-dump. This will avoid downloading too many emojis during rendering.

    wget -c https://github.com/ppwwyyxx/wechat-dump/releases/download/0.1/emoji.cache.tar.bz2
    tar xf emoji.cache.tar.bz2
   

Run:

• Parse and dump text messages of every chat (requires decoded database):

  ./dump-msg.py decoded.db output_dir
  

• List all chats (required decoded database):

  ./list-chats.py decoded.db
  

• Generate statistics report on text messages (requires output_dir from ./dump-msg.py):

  ./count-message.sh output_dir
  

• Dump messages of one contact to html, containing voice messages, emojis, and images (requires decoded database and resource):

  ./dump-html.py "<contact_display_name>"
  

  • The output file is output.html. Check ./dump-html.py -h to use different input/output paths.
  • Add --wxgf-server ws://xx.xx.xx.xx:xxxx to use a WXGF decoder server.

Examples:

Screenshots of generated html:

See here for an example html.

TODO List (help needed!)

• After chat history migration, some emojis in the EmojiInfo table don't have corresponding URLs but only a md5 - they are not downloaded by WeChat until the message needs to be displayed. We don't know how to manually download these emojis.
• Decoding WXGF images using an android app is too complex. Looking for an easier way (e.g. qemu).
• Fix rare unhandled message types: > 10000 and < 0
• Better user experiences... see grep 'TODO' wechat -R

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