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.

Answer 2

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))

Answer 3

I used Word Object Model to extract comments with replies from a Word document. Documentation on Comments object can be found here. This documentation uses Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). But I was able to use the functions in Python with slight modifications. Only issue with Word Object Model is that I had to use win32com package from pywin32 which works fine on Windows PC, but I'm not sure if it will work on macOS.

Here's the sample code I used to extract comments with associated replies:

    import win32com.client as win32
    from win32com.client import constants

    word = win32.gencache.EnsureDispatch('Word.Application')
    word.Visible = False 
    filepath = "path\to\file.docx"

    def get_comments(filepath):
        doc = word.Documents.Open(filepath) 
        doc.Activate()
        activeDoc = word.ActiveDocument
        for c in activeDoc.Comments: 
            if c.Ancestor is None: #checking if this is a top-level comment
                print("Comment by: " + c.Author)
                print("Comment text: " + c.Range.Text) #text of the comment
                print("Regarding: " + c.Scope.Text) #text of the original document where the comment is anchored 
                if len(c.Replies)> 0: #if the comment has replies
                    print("Number of replies: " + str(len(c.Replies)))
                    for r in range(1, len(c.Replies)+1):
                        print("Reply by: " + c.Replies(r).Author)
                        print("Reply text: " + c.Replies(r).Range.Text) #text of the reply
        doc.Close()