Analyzing irregular data from Facebook Messenger

birdie124

Hey there,

I would like to analyze data I downloaded from my Facebook Messenger, however the format the data arrived in is puzzling for me. 

You can see the raw data in the first column. I described it in the second column.

You'll notice that most of the data follows the pattern of Sender > Message> Reaction (if any) > Date.

When a photo or GIF is sent, the cell is empty.

When there is no reaction to a message or a photo/gif, the data follows the pattern of Sender > Message> Date.

Raw data	My classification
Person A	Sender
Hello	Message
❤Person B	Reaction
Jun 09, 2023 9:21:51pm	Date
Person A	Sender
	Photo (when a photo is sent, the row is empty)
❤Person B	Reaction
Jun 09, 2023 9:21:38pm	Date
Person B	Sender
Hey there	Message
Jun 09, 2023 9:10:51pm	Date
Person B	Sender
Good morning	Message
Jun 09, 2023 9:10:45pm	Date
Person A	Sender
Top of the morning	Message
❤Person B	Reaction
Jun 09, 2023 9:09:37pm	Date

As I have hundreds of thousands rows of data, doing the manual classification for all rows is not an option

I scoured the community for an answer but I could only find solutions that handled such data when the data followed a more regular pattern than here. 

Could you please advise me on the steps that would get me to the following data structure?

Thank you in advance

Sender	Message	Reaction	Date
Person A	Hello	❤Person B	Jun 09, 2023 9:21:51pm
Person A	Picture/gif	❤Person B	Jun 09, 2023 9:21:38pm
Person B	Hey there		Jun 09, 2023 9:10:51pm
Person B	Good morning		Jun 09, 2023 9:10:45pm
Person A	Top of the morning	❤Person B	Jun 09, 2023 9:09:37pm

sample data.xlsx

Yoshiro_Fujimori

Hi @birdie124 ,

Here is one way of doing this.

The approach is to simply fill the category one by one using IF clauses.

As the sample data is small, there might be still some exceptional cases with larger data set.

So please test with larger data and modify the formula if necessary.

Workflow

Formula tool

Category = IF REGEX_Match([data], "[^[:ascii:]].*") THEN "Reaction" ELSE Null() ENDIF

Category = IF IsNull([Category]) AND REGEX_Match([data], "\w{3}\s\d{2},\s\d{4}.*") THEN "Date" ELSE [Category] ENDIF

Category = IF IsNull([data]) THEN "Photo" ELSE [Category] ENDIF

Multi-Row Formula

Category = 

IF IsEmpty([Row-1:data]) AND IsEmpty([Row-1:Category]) OR [Row-1:Category] = "Date" THEN "Sender" ELSE [Category] ENDIF

Formula

Category = IF IsNull([Category]) THEN "Message" ELSE [Category] ENDIF

Multi-Row Formula

IF [Category] = "Sender" THEN [Row-1:RecordID] + 1 ELSE [Row-1:RecordID] ENDIF

Output

FacebookMessenger.yxmd