Scrape and Analyze Your WeChat Friends with Python and R

WeChat, with nearly 900 million users, is a super‑app that many rely on for chatting, sharing, reading, and payments. The author used Python's itchat package, which provides a personal‑account API for WeChat, to crawl their own friend list and explore insights such as gender ratios and geographic distribution.

After installing itchat via the terminal, the script logs in by displaying a QR code, scans it, and then retrieves friend information into a friends data structure.

Gender Ratio of My WeChat Friends

The gender field is stored under the key Sex (1 for male, 2 for female, others for unknown). By iterating over the data, the author calculated the following percentages:

Male friends: 37.65%

Female friends: 59.23%

Unknown gender: 3.12%

City Distribution of My WeChat Friends

Each friend entry also contains nickname, province, city, and personal signature. By extracting these fields into a data frame and preprocessing with R, the author grouped and aggregated the data by province and city, then plotted the top 20 locations using ggplot2. The results show a concentration in Guangdong (especially Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai), followed by Auckland, Sichuan, Macau, etc., with many friends having no location set (NA).

Word Cloud of Friends' Signatures

The author also collected each friend's personal signature, cleaned it by removing emojis, HTML tags, and punctuation with regular expressions, and concatenated the text. Using the jieba segmentation library, the text was tokenised, then visualised as a word cloud shaped like the author's avatar with matplotlib, wordcloud, numpy, and PIL.

The resulting word cloud reveals frequent themes such as listening, kindness, soul, perseverance, and dreams among the friends' signatures.

Conclusion

The experiment shows how easy it is to open a new window into one's social network using Python and R for data extraction and visual analysis, and hints at further possibilities with itchat like auto‑reply, friend addition, and group management.