WhatsApp is great at holding your data hostage. There is no "export group members" button, no "download my contacts" option, and the one export it does give you (Export chat) spits out a plain text file for a single conversation. If you run a community, do recruiting, or use WhatsApp as an informal CRM, you have probably hit this wall and ended up copy pasting names into a spreadsheet at 1am.
I want to walk through what you can actually pull out of WhatsApp Web, what you cannot, and the different ways to get it into a CSV or JSON file you can work with.
First, set expectations: you can only export what you can see
This part matters, because a lot of "WhatsApp scraper" tools online promise things that are not real. You cannot export:
Phone numbers that WhatsApp hides from you
