Emoji Extraction¶

Once your chat exports are in the correct format, use emoji-extract to extract emojis and save them to a SQLite database.

Basic Usage¶

Single File¶

Extract emojis from a single chat file:

emoji-extract -i messages/chat.txt -o data/emojis.sql

Directory¶

Extract emojis from all files in a directory:

emoji-extract -i messages/ -o data/emojis.sql

The tool will process all .txt files in the directory.

Command Options¶

What Gets Extracted¶

The extractor processes each message and:

1. Identifies emojis using the emoji Python library
2. Extracts metadata:
3. The emoji character itself
4. Message timestamp (from Sent: field)
5. Username (from From: field)
6. Chat name (from filename, excluding text in parentheses)
7. Stores in SQLite for efficient querying

Chat Name Extraction¶

The chat name is derived from the filename:

Text in parentheses is automatically removed.

Output¶

The command outputs:

Processing: messages/chat1.txt
Found 42 emoji instances
Processing: messages/chat2.txt
Found 18 emoji instances
Exporting to: data/emojis.sql
Done!

The resulting SQLite database contains an emojis table with all extracted data. See Database Schema for details.

Examples¶

Organize Data by Source¶

Keep different sources separate:

# Signal messages
emoji-extract -i signal_messages/ -o data/signal.sql

# WhatsApp messages
emoji-extract -i converted_whatsapp/ -o data/whatsapp.sql

Later, you can explore them together:

emoji-explore data/signal.sql data/whatsapp.sql

Quick Test¶

Test with a single file first:

emoji-extract -i messages/test.txt -o /tmp/test.sql
emoji-explore /tmp/test.sql