Tools to fetch the complete history of a GroupMe group chat and analyze it.

groupme-fetch.py allows you to grab the entire transcript for one of your groups and save it as JSON for backup and analysis. It is documented; run it with --help for help. It also allows you to fetch recent updates in the group to keep your JSON file up to date.

simple-transcript.py processes a JSON file into a human-readable text transcript.

The files in the stat folder are self-explanatory; they allow for learning interesting things about the transcript's content and the group's history.

nb. there are better ways to do this now; see GroupMe API docs.

Log into GroupMe's web interface and use Chrome or Safari's inspector to monitor the network requests when you load one of your groups.

You'll notice a GET request to an endpoint https://v2.groupme.com/groups/GROUP_ID/messages.

One of the headers sent with that request, X-Access-Token, is your access token.

nb. there are better ways to do this now; see GroupMe API docs.

Again, in GroupMe's web interface, the group ID is the numeric ID included in the group's URL (https://web.groupme.com/groups/GROUP_ID).

This was written and tested on Python 2.7, because I didn't want to waste time getting my Homebrew installation to install things for Python 3. I suspect this script will break if you run it with Python 3, because Unicode.

The only other dependency is Requests. pip install requests. At the time of writing, the current version was 1.1.0.

groupme-fetch.py will store emoji and other non-ASCII characters in the transcript JSON fine, as expected.

These tools have been tested with a transcript containing ~16,000 messages on a 1.7GHz/4GB Macbook Air. It works fine.

After your initial fetch with groupme-fetch.py, optionally using the oldest option to fetch older history. You should have a complete transcript up to the last time you fetched. Then...

Note the oldest or newest parameters are message IDs from your transcript JSON file.

python groupme-fetch.py GROUPID ACCESSTOKEN newest $(python newest-id.py transcript-GROUPID.json)