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

Open Office has an API

Answer 2

Using the OpenOffice API, and Python, and Andrew Pitonyak's excellent online macro book I managed to do this. Section 7.16.4 is the place to start.

One other tip to make it work without needing the screen at all is to use the Hidden property:

RO = PropertyValue('ReadOnly', 0, True, 0)
Hidden = PropertyValue('Hidden', 0, True, 0)
xDoc = desktop.loadComponentFromURL( docpath,"_blank", 0, (RO, Hidden,) )

Otherwise the document flicks up on the screen (probably on the webserver console) when you open it.

Answer 3

For docx files, check out the Python script docx2txt available at

http://cobweb.ecn.purdue.edu/~kak/distMisc/docx2txt

for extracting the plain text from a docx document.

Answer 4

(Same answer as extracting text from MS word files in python)

Use the native Python docx module which I made this week. Here's how to extract all the text from a doc:

document = opendocx('Hello world.docx')

# This location is where most document content lives 
docbody = document.xpath('/w:document/w:body', namespaces=wordnamespaces)[0]

# Extract all text
print getdocumenttext(document)

See Python DocX site

100% Python, no COM, no .net, no Java, no parsing serialized XML with regexs, no crap.