How to open and read a WhatsApp chat .txt file

When someone uses WhatsApp’s Export chat option, the app doesn’t make a backup or a screenshot: it writes the whole conversation into a plain old text file with a .txt extension. If someone sent you one, or you exported it yourself and aren’t sure what to do with it, here’s how to open it on each device and what you’ll find inside.

What the WhatsApp .txt file is

.txt just means “text”: a file with no formatting, colors or images, which any computer or phone can open. WhatsApp uses it to export conversations because it’s the most universal format there is.

It reaches you in one of two ways:

Source	What you get	Typical name
iPhone	A .zip with the text inside	“WhatsApp Chat - Group name.zip”, with _chat.txt inside
Android	Usually a plain .txt	“WhatsApp Chat with Group name.txt”
“Attach media” export	A .zip (or several files) with the text plus the photos, videos and voice notes	The same, but much bigger

The exact name depends on the phone’s language. If you don’t have the file yet, the guide to exporting a WhatsApp chat walks through the steps on iPhone and Android.

How to open it on each device

iPhone

1. If you saved it with Save to Files, open the Files app and find it in the folder you chose.
2. Tap the .zip: the iPhone unzips it and creates a folder with the same name.
3. Open the folder and tap _chat.txt. It shows up as a text document you can scroll and search.

If someone sent it to you on WhatsApp, tap the file in the chat, then the share button and Save to Files, and follow the same steps.

Android

1. Open your phone’s file app (for example Files by Google) or Google Drive, depending on where you saved it.
2. If it’s a .txt, tap it and pick any text viewer or editor.
3. If it’s a .zip, Files by Google offers Extract; then open the .txt that appears.

Windows

Double-click the .zip to see what’s inside, drag the .txt to the desktop and open it with Notepad. Current versions of Windows 10 and 11 handle accents and most emojis fine.

Mac

Double-click the .zip (the Mac unzips it by itself) and open _chat.txt with TextEdit. Press the space bar with the file selected and Quick Look shows it without opening any app.

What you’ll find inside

Each message starts with the date and time, then the name of whoever wrote it as it’s saved in your contacts, then the text:

[05/10/2026, 21:14:03] Anna: Who's bringing dessert?
[05/10/2026, 21:15:41] Ben: Me 🍰

On Android there are no square brackets or seconds, and there’s a dash before the name. You’ll also see:

• System notices, like “Anna added Ben” or “Messages and calls are end-to-end encrypted”.
• Media markers like <Media omitted> where someone sent a photo, sticker or voice note, if the chat was exported without media.
• “This message was deleted” where someone deleted a message for everyone. The deleted text isn’t there: an export doesn’t recover anything.
• Multi-line messages, which carry on in the lines below without a date.

If you want the details of how it’s built (date formats, invisible characters, the differences between phones), the guide to the WhatsApp export file format takes it apart line by line.

If it looks wrong

• You see things like é instead of accented letters. The file is UTF-8 and the program read it with an old encoding. Open it in a current editor or, where the program allows it, choose “UTF-8” when opening.
• You see boxes or question marks. Those are emojis the font can’t draw. The text itself is fine; it’s only a display issue.
• The file is huge and your phone struggles. It probably includes photos and videos. You only need the .txt to read it; export the chat again with Without media and it’ll be much smaller.
• It doesn’t start when the group was created. An export only carries what’s on the exporter’s phone, and it’s capped at about 40,000 recent messages without media. If the group is very long, the first line tells you where it starts.

What you can and can’t do with it

You can:

• Search it. Ctrl+F (or Cmd+F on a Mac) finds a word, a name or a date much faster than scrolling back in WhatsApp.
• Archive it. It’s a good keepsake of a group that’s winding down, or of a chat you want to keep off your phone.
• Analyze it. Drop the .txt or .zip into the Chat Recap analyzer to see who talks the most, the peak hours, the awards and a story-style Wrapped. It’s worked out in your browser, without uploading the chat to any server, and it’s free.

You can’t:

• Put it back into WhatsApp. The app doesn’t import .txt files. Getting chats back inside WhatsApp takes an iCloud or Google Drive backup.
• See the photos if it was exported without media. Only the marker that something was there remains.
• Recover deleted messages. If they were deleted before the export, the file only shows the notice.

You can open it in Excel, but it’s rarely worth it: multi-line messages and commas in the text break the columns.

If someone sent you a group chat

A chat .txt holds the whole conversation that was on the exporter’s phone, with names and sometimes phone numbers. Treat it the way you’d treat screenshots of that group:

• Don’t forward it to people who weren’t in the chat.
• Don’t upload it to websites that store files on a server unless you know what they’ll do with it.
• Delete it once you’re done, including from Downloads, your email and Drive or iCloud.

The guide to analyzing a chat privately covers what to check before handing it to any tool.