python convert microsoft office docs to plain text on linux

Question

Any recomendations on a method to convert .doc, .ppt, and .xls to plain text on linux using python? Really any method of conversion would be useful. I have already looked at

Answer 1

Same problem here. Below is my simple script to convert all doc files in dir 'docs/' to dir 'txts/' using catdoc. Hope it will help someone:

#!/usr/bin/env python 
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import glob, re, os
f = glob.glob('docs/*.doc') + glob.glob('docs/*.DOC')

outDir = 'txts'
if not os.path.exists(outDir):
    os.makedirs(outDir)
for i in f:
    os.system("catdoc -w '%s' > '%s'" %
              (i, outDir + '/' + re.sub(r'.*/([^.]+)\.doc', r'\1.txt', i,
                                   flags=re.IGNORECASE)))