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

Thank you @kjhughes for this amazing answer for extracting all the comments from the document file. I was facing same issue like others in this thread to get the text that the comment relates to. I took the code from @kjhughes as a base and try to solve this using python-docx. So here is my take at this.

Sample document.

I will extract the comment and the paragraph which it was referenced in the document.

from docx import Document
from lxml import etree
import zipfile
ooXMLns = {'w':'http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main'}
#Function to extract all the comments of document(Same as accepted answer)
#Returns a dictionary with comment id as key and comment string as value
def get_document_comments(docxFileName):
    comments_dict={}
    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:
        comment=c.xpath('string(.)',namespaces=ooXMLns)
        comment_id=c.xpath('@w:id',namespaces=ooXMLns)[0]
        comments_dict[comment_id]=comment
    return comments_dict
#Function to fetch all the comments in a paragraph
def paragraph_comments(paragraph,comments_dict):
    comments=[]
    for run in paragraph.runs:
        comment_reference=run._r.xpath("./w:commentReference")
        if comment_reference:
            comment_id=comment_reference[0].xpath('@w:id',namespaces=ooXMLns)[0]
            comment=comments_dict[comment_id]
            comments.append(comment)
    return comments
#Function to fetch all comments with their referenced paragraph
#This will return list like this [{'Paragraph text': [comment 1,comment 2]}]
def comments_with_reference_paragraph(docxFileName):
    document = Document(docxFileName)
    comments_dict=get_document_comments(docxFileName)
    comments_with_their_reference_paragraph=[]
    for paragraph in document.paragraphs:  
        if comments_dict: 
            comments=paragraph_comments(paragraph,comments_dict)  
            if comments:
                comments_with_their_reference_paragraph.append({paragraph.text: comments})
    return comments_with_their_reference_paragraph
if __name__=="__main__":
    document="Hi this is a test.docx"
    print(comments_with_reference_paragraph(document))

Output for the sample document look like this

I have done this at a paragraph level. This could be done at a python-docx run level as well. Hopefully it will be of help.