Best way to extract text from a Word doc without using COM/automation?

Question

Is there a reasonable way to extract plain text from a Word file that doesn\'t depend on COM automation? (This is a a feature for a web app deployed on a non-Windows platfo

Answer 1

If all you want to do is extracting text from Word files (.docx), it's possible to do it only with Python. Like Guy Starbuck wrote it, you just need to unzip the file and then parse the XML. Inspired by python-docx, I have written a simple function to do this:

try:
    from xml.etree.cElementTree import XML
except ImportError:
    from xml.etree.ElementTree import XML
import zipfile


"""
Module that extract text from MS XML Word document (.docx).
(Inspired by python-docx )
"""

WORD_NAMESPACE = '{http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main}'
PARA = WORD_NAMESPACE + 'p'
TEXT = WORD_NAMESPACE + 't'


def get_docx_text(path):
    """
    Take the path of a docx file as argument, return the text in unicode.
    """
    document = zipfile.ZipFile(path)
    xml_content = document.read('word/document.xml')
    document.close()
    tree = XML(xml_content)

    paragraphs = []
    for paragraph in tree.getiterator(PARA):
        texts = [node.text
                 for node in paragraph.getiterator(TEXT)
                 if node.text]
        if texts:
            paragraphs.append(''.join(texts))

    return '\n\n'.join(paragraphs)