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Faulty Username Parsing...?

See original GitHub issue

First off thanks for this cool script.

Something seems to be wrong with the way you are parsing user names from the html. Not sure if facebook changed their html structure or if this something on my end or what.

I’m using the following command:

fbcap messages.htm -d parsed_msgs/

And get the following output (I removed the FB ID #'s in XXXX@facebook.com):

Discovered chat thread with [XXXXXX@facebook.com, XXXXXXX@facebook.com]...Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "c:\program files (x86)\python\lib\runpy.py", line 170, in _run_module_as_main
    "__main__", mod_spec)
  File "c:\program files (x86)\python\lib\runpy.py", line 85, in _run_code
    exec(code, run_globals)
  File "C:\Program Files (x86)\Python\Scripts\fbcap.exe\__main__.py", line 9, in <module>
  File "c:\program files (x86)\python\lib\site-packages\fbchat_archive_parser\main.py", line 188, in main
    app.run()
  File "c:\program files (x86)\python\lib\site-packages\clip.py", line 652, in run
    self.invoke(self.parse(tokens))
  File "c:\program files (x86)\python\lib\site-packages\clip.py", line 634, in invoke
    self._main.invoke(parsed)
  File "c:\program files (x86)\python\lib\site-packages\clip.py", line 519, in invoke
    self._callback(**{k: v for k, v in iteritems(parsed) if k not in self._subcommands})
  File "c:\program files (x86)\python\lib\site-packages\fbchat_archive_parser\main.py", line 125, in fbcap
    fbch = parser.parse()
  File "c:\program files (x86)\python\lib\site-packages\fbchat_archive_parser\parser.py", line 102, in parse
    self._parse_content()
  File "c:\program files (x86)\python\lib\site-packages\fbchat_archive_parser\parser.py", line 128, in _parse_content
    self._process_element(pos, element)
  File "c:\program files (x86)\python\lib\site-packages\fbchat_archive_parser\parser.py", line 262, in _process_element
    self.current_sender))
Exception: Data missing from message. This is a parsingerror: 2013-06-02 17:22:00-07:00, None

So obviously it’s getting “None” for the username. If I just add the line self.current_user = “Unknown” before the thrown exception the script runs and completes but it obviously just results in every user getting named “Unknown” in every conversation.

Issue Analytics

State:
Created 6 years ago
Reactions:1
Comments:14 (7 by maintainers)

Top GitHub Comments

1reaction

ownaginatiouscommented, Jul 4, 2017

I meant the language locale you set your Facebook browsing settings too (most issues stem from other languages), but I was able to reproduce the problem anyway by just downloading my data again in English (US).

Anyway, you’re right in that this issue was caused by a change on Facebook’s end. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be a formatting change… the archives are now literally just missing the name of the user who posted each message 😕

Example:

...
    <div class="message">
        <div class="message_header"><span class="user"></span><span class="meta">Tuesday, February 12, 2013 at 9:15am PST</span></div>
    </div>
...

As you can see, the text is missing in <span class="user"></span>.

I’ll try writing to Facebook to see if they can fix it.

Sorry for the inconvenience 😕

0reactions

eldenvocommented, Aug 14, 2017

No, sadly I tried a different language and re-downloading, for the same problem!

Guess I’ll just keep trying from time to time to see if FB fixes it!