Extract DOCX Comments

Question

I\'m a teacher. I want a list of all the students who commented on the essay I assigned, and what they said. The Drive API stuff was too challenging for me, but I figured I

Answer 1

You got remarkably far considering that OOXML is such a complex format.

Here's some sample Python code showing how to access the comments of a DOCX file via XPath:

from lxml import etree
import zipfile

ooXMLns = {'w':'http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main'}

def get_comments(docxFileName):
  docxZip = zipfile.ZipFile(docxFileName)
  commentsXML = docxZip.read('word/comments.xml')
  et = etree.XML(commentsXML)
  comments = et.xpath('//w:comment',namespaces=ooXMLns)
  for c in comments:
    # attributes:
    print(c.xpath('@w:author',namespaces=ooXMLns))
    print(c.xpath('@w:date',namespaces=ooXMLns))
    # string value of the comment:
    print(c.xpath('string(.)',namespaces=ooXMLns))