Open a WhatsApp export
A chat export is a text file that is technically readable and practically not: every line starts with a bracketed timestamp, long messages run together, and searching for a name misses half its hits because of characters you cannot see. This opens it properly. No account, no payment, and nothing leaves your browser.
The .zip WhatsApp gives you, or the .txt inside it. It is read in this browser and never sent anywhere, so there is nothing to delete afterwards.
Why the dates are not tidied up
They are shown exactly as the file writes them. 3/4/24 is the third of April or the fourth of March depending on the phone that produced the export, and no export records which. Guessing would be easy and occasionally wrong, which is the worst combination for a conversation someone may end up relying on. A viewer’s job is to show you your file, not to decide things about it.
If something looks wrong
The warnings above the messages are the parser telling you what it could not settle: lines it could not attribute to a sender, two exports concatenated, timestamps that contradict themselves. They are worth reading before anything else, because a document built on an export nobody checked is a document with a surprise in it.
Not sure how to produce one? How to export a chat from WhatsApp. Wondering what the format actually is? The export format, in detail.