How to Scrape WeChat Moments with Python and Scrapy: Step‑by‑Step Guide

Getting the WeChat Moments Data

To scrape WeChat Moments, first use the third‑party service "出书啦" which can export Moments and generate a WeChat book. Follow the public account, click Create Book → WeChat Book , add the service as a friend via the QR code, and wait for the book generation notification.

Ensure your Moments are set to Public . Then open the provided external link, scan the QR code to authorize login, and you will reach the WeChat book web page.

Creating the Scrapy Project

Install Scrapy, then open a command line in your chosen folder and run: scrapy startproject weixin_moment Enter the project directory: cd weixin_moment Create a spider for the WeChat book domain:

scrapy genspider moment chushu.la

The generated folder structure will look like the following:

Analyzing the Webpage

Open the WeChat book page in Chrome, press F12, go to the Network tab, and enable Preserve log . The initial request is a GET returning status 200 with JSON data.

When you click a month in the navigation pane, the page loads the corresponding Moments via a POST request. The request payload changes for each month, indicating dynamic loading.

The server response contains the Moments data under the paras/data node, which can be parsed from JSON.

With the request pattern and JSON structure identified, you can now write a Scrapy spider to send the appropriate POST requests, parse the paras/data field, and store the extracted Moments data for further analysis.

Stay tuned for the next article where the full crawling code will be presented.