How to read contents of an Table in MS-Word file Using Python?

Question

How can I read and process contents of every cell of a table in a DOCX file?

I am using Python 3.2 on Windows 7 and PyWin32 to access the MS-Word Document.

I

Answer 1

Here is what works for me in Python 2.7:

import win32com.client as win32
word = win32.Dispatch("Word.Application")
word.Visible = 0
word.Documents.Open("MyDocument")
doc = word.ActiveDocument

To see how many tables your document has:

doc.Tables.Count

Then, you can select the table you want by its index. Note that, unlike python, COM indexing starts at 1:

table = doc.Tables(1)

To select a cell:

table.Cell(Row = 1, Column= 1)

To get its content:

table.Cell(Row =1, Column =1).Range.Text

Hope that this helps.

EDIT:

An example of a function that returns Column index based on its heading:

def Column_index(header_text):
for i in range(1 , table.Columns.Count+1):
    if table.Cell(Row = 1,Column = i).Range.Text == header_text:
        return i

then you can access the cell you want this way for example:

table.Cell(Row =1, Column = Column_index("The Column Header") ).Range.Text

Answer 2

Jumping in rather late in life, but thought I'd put this out anyway: Now (2015), you can use the pretty neat doc python library: https://python-docx.readthedocs.org/en/latest/. And then:

from docx import Document

wordDoc = Document('<path to docx file>')

for table in wordDoc.tables:
    for row in table.rows:
        for cell in row.cells:
            print cell.text

Answer 3

I found a simple code snippet on a blog Reading Table Contents Using Python by etienne

The great thing about this is that you don't need any non-standard python libraries installed.

The format of a docx file is described at Open Office XML.

import zipfile
import xml.etree.ElementTree

WORD_NAMESPACE = '{http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main}'
PARA = WORD_NAMESPACE + 'p'
TEXT = WORD_NAMESPACE + 't'
TABLE = WORD_NAMESPACE + 'tbl'
ROW = WORD_NAMESPACE + 'tr'
CELL = WORD_NAMESPACE + 'tc'

with zipfile.ZipFile('<path to docx file>') as docx:
    tree = xml.etree.ElementTree.XML(docx.read('word/document.xml'))

for table in tree.iter(TABLE):
    for row in table.iter(ROW):
        for cell in row.iter(CELL):
            print ''.join(node.text for node in cell.iter(TEXT))