Export whatsapp messages to react-native app - react-native

Question

I'm trying to access whatsapp messages from my device with react-native. Accessing them directly seems impossible so I was looking into the possibility of exporting the messages and importing them in my app. The options which are currently provided by whatsapp sharing menu lack any direct download option.
Is there a way to add my app to the whatsapp sharing menu? Or is there an easy way to import these messages?

Answer 1

You can use https://github.com/meedan/react-native-share-menu this library for exporting chat from Whatsapp. When you export chat file from WhatsApp, your app will show on the share dialog. After that, you can open that file from your app like below
ShareMenu.getSharedText((text :string) => {
if (text && text.length) {
if (text.startsWith('content://media/')) {
//this will be a media
} else {
content = this.readFile(text)
}
}
})
Then you can read the content of that file using RNFS library
readFile = async (path) => {
try {
const contents = await RNFS.readFile(path, "utf8");
return("" + contents);
} catch (e) {
alert("" + e);
}
};
After getting the content of the chat, you can parse that chats.

Answer 2

We had the same issue when building a Website to analyze WhatsApp chats, as with android you can not save the exported chat on the device.
Our solution was to use a PWA (Progressive Web App) and listen share Events.
When somebody now installs the PWA, they can share the export with the App directly. (Currently, this is only supported for Android with Chrome, as Apple is heavily against PWAs)
Our implementation:
if (workbox) {
workbox.addEventListener("message", (m) => {
// eslint-disable-next-line no-prototype-builtins
if (_this.$route.query.hasOwnProperty("receiving-file-share")) {
let files = m.data.file;
// currently only the first file, but ultimately we want to pass all files
_this.$refs.filehandler.processFileList(files, true);
}
});
workbox.messageSW("SHARE_READY");
}