Messenger-Parser

I spend a lot of time on Messenger and I believe that small extentions can not only improve my conversations on the site but teach me to have better conversations in general - offline and online.

So that's why I'm open-sourcing Messenger Parser, so that we can all figure out the hard parts of conversation together.

This bare-bones script parses messenger conversations (via the dom) and converts them into an array of json objects like so:

[
  {
    msg: "This is a text",
    person: "Curtis",
    timeSent: "10:19pm",
    type: "text"
  },
  {
    person: "Curtis",
    timeSent: "10:20pm",
    type: "img"
  }
]

Note: open up the js console in Chrome to see the messages parsed by this extension.

Features:

Can detect images, attachments, and text messages.
Can detect when someone in the chat sends a message.
A reload button to reparse the entire dom at once.
A beautiful show/hide button that will make

Known bugs:

Sometimes when someone (that isn't you) sends a message, the event listener doesn't pick it up.

TODO:

The ability to convert the Messenger timestamps into a UTC date.
I've looked at the DOM and there only seems to be 3 cases for the types of dates that needs to be parsed. So it shouldn't be too hard.

Installation

First you'll need to install the dependencies. We can do this by downloading the js dependency files from CDNs using curl.

curl https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.3.1.min.js > dependencies/jquery-3.3.1.min.js

Now follow the advice from Thoughbot:

To load your extension in Chrome, open up chrome://extensions/ in your browser and click “Developer mode” in the top right. Now click “Load unpacked extension…” and select the extension’s directory. You should now see your extension in the list.
When you change or add code in your extension, just come back to this page and reload the page. Chrome will reload your extension.

Development Notes (please read if you haven't made a chrome extension before!):

I would highly recommend by starting with: https://thoughtbot.com/blog/how-to-make-a-chrome-extension

This will get you acquainted with the restrictions (and work arounds) that you'll face when writing Chrome extensions.

Next you should get the Extensions Reloader chrome extension. This will toggle your extension off/on when you click the icon in your extensions bar. Use this everytime you make a change to your code or you won't see the updates!

Warning

If you change the manifest.json you must manually turn off/on the extension in chrome://extensions/ or your changes won't propagate. Extensions Reloader will not work for manifest changes.

curtischong / messenger-parser Goto Github PK