Read Your Twitter/X Archive

What this tool does

Paste the tweets.js file from a Twitter/X data export and get something you can actually read: every post with its UTC timestamp, likes, retweets, language and posting app, classified as original, reply or retweet, plus a summary of how you posted over the years. The archive is parsed in your browser — nothing is uploaded, and no account or API key is involved.

The export is not JSON. data/tweets.js is a JavaScript assignment, window.YTD.tweets.part0 = [ … ], wrapping an array of {"tweet": {…}} envelopes with t.co short links, HTML-escaped text and engagement counts stored as strings. This tool strips the wrapper, expands each t.co link back to the URL the archive already stores for it, decodes the entities, and renders the result as Markdown, plain text, HTML or CSV.

Worked example

Input — a two-tweet tweets.js (an original with a shortened link, and a reply):

window.YTD.tweets.part0 = [
  {"tweet":{"id_str":"1746900000000000001","created_at":"Mon Jan 15 09:30:00 +0000 2024","full_text":"Shipped the new parser today &amp; it is fast https://t.co/abc123 #rust","favorite_count":"42","retweet_count":"7","lang":"en","source":"<a href=\"https://x.com\" rel=\"nofollow\">Twitter Web App</a>","entities":{"hashtags":[{"text":"rust"}],"urls":[{"url":"https://t.co/abc123","expanded_url":"https://example.com/parser"}]}}},
  {"tweet":{"id_str":"1746900000000000002","created_at":"Mon Jan 15 11:00:00 +0000 2024","full_text":"@bob good point, will fix","favorite_count":"3","retweet_count":"0","lang":"en","in_reply_to_screen_name":"bob"}}
]

Output — summary plus transcript, plain text, top 1 by likes:

Tweets in file: 2
Tweets after filters: 2
Tweets shown: 2 (1 original, 1 replies, 0 retweets)
Likes received: 45 (avg 22.50 per tweet)
Retweets received: 7 (avg 3.50 per tweet)
Words shown: 16
Date range: 2024-01-15 to 2024-01-15

Tweets per year:
  2024       2  100.00%

Top hashtags:
  #rust         1  50.00%

Top link domains:
  example.com       1  50.00%

Top 1 by likes:
  2024-01-15 — Shipped the new parser today & it is fast https://example.com/parser #rust  42 likes, 7 retweets  https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1746900000000000001

=== Transcript ===

[2024-01-15 11:00:00 UTC] reply · to @bob · 3 likes · 0 retweets · en
@bob good point, will fix
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1746900000000000002

[2024-01-15 09:30:00 UTC] original · 42 likes · 7 retweets · en · Twitter Web App
Shipped the new parser today & it is fast https://example.com/parser #rust
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1746900000000000001

Note what changed: & became &, https://t.co/abc123 became https://example.com/parser, Twitter Web App was unwrapped from its HTML anchor, and each tweet gained a permalink built from its id.

Options

Limits & edge cases

• Paste the text, not the zip. Extract the archive first and open data/tweets.js as text. A bare JSON array, un-enveloped tweet objects, and any window.YTD.tweet.partN = variant are all accepted; the trailing ; is fine.
• Multi-part archives. Very large exports split into tweets-part1.js, tweets-part2.js and so on. Run each part separately, or paste the concatenated JSON arrays as one array.
• tweets.js does not contain your handle. Permalinks therefore use the account-agnostic https://twitter.com/i/web/status/<id> form, which redirects to the live post.
• Everything is UTC. created_at carries a +0000 offset in the export; dates, the date filters and the per-year rows are all UTC, so results are reproducible regardless of your timezone.
• Media is referenced, not embedded. Photos and videos become [photo: url] / [video: url] placeholders built from the archive metadata. The tool never downloads files or touches the archive's media/ folder.
• Engagement counts are frozen at export time. Likes and retweets are whatever Twitter/X wrote into the file, not live numbers. Retweets you made typically show 0 likes, since the counts belong to the original post.
• Only tweets.js. Direct messages, likes, followers and ad data live in separate files in the export and are not read here.
• Unparseable timestamps fall back to the epoch, so a tweet with a malformed created_at sorts to 1970 rather than disappearing. Empty input, non-JSON input, JSON that is not an array, an array with no tweet objects, and reversed date bounds are reported as explicit errors.
• Big archives are browser-bound. Tens of thousands of tweets parse fine, but rendering them all at once is heavy. Filter or cap first, then remove the cap for the final export.

FAQ