How can I print out FaceBook Message string?

Factual Questions
1

I need to print out a string of Facebook dms. I was able to find a way to copy the file, which results in a .json file. But how can I print it out?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

2

Short of a third party extension/website, I’m not seeing anything. The best I can find is to take a screenshot (or multiple screenshots if it’s longer than a page) and print those out.

3

Nevermind, I found a way. Go to your privacy settings, search for “download” and click on “download your information”. Go to “customize information” and unselect everything but ‘messages’. Export it, open the file and print what you need printed.

(I think, I’m testing it out, it takes a little while to download)

4

Can you open the .json file with a text editor like notepad++.
I guess it could contain binary info, but it also could be quite readable and could just need some copy/paste

Brian

5

You could paste the contents of the json file (which is just a structured text format) into any decent AI, and say “give me a human readable, printable version of this”. it will immediately discover it’s json, parse it, and make it something more readable.

6

Or if you can get it as a single page, a single window or tab, in a web browser, a browser can print that.

7

Turns out ‘a little while’ is about a day. I just got the data dump from facebook and can confirm it’ll export your messages in a printable format.

8

thank you!

9

Can you get the conversation in one big long web page?

Then, instead scrolling etc., do CTL-A to select all, then CTL-C to copy the whole web page.

Then paste it into Notepad to remove all the HTML , images, etc that messes things up, gets rid of all the formatting but the text. Clean up / delete things like the stuff at the top and bottom of the page, any web ads, etc. Delete extra linefeeds. (May be tedious, depending on the length.)

Presumably the goal is to get a copy of just the text.

This also works for websites like long news articles, or chat sites like Reddit. (Reddit now seems to hide some posts in long conversations until you scroll there…) Notepad is ideal for cleaning up to get just text from a website. As an added benefit, some news sites will show you the article but then overlay it with their subscrition notice or blur the text. CTL-A will for some sites copy everything, including the text and you can paste it into Notepad to read the article they have let you sort-of see.