How to extract text from an existing docx file using python-docx

Question

I\'m trying to use python-docx module (pip install python-docx) but it seems to be very confusing as in github repo test sample they are using

Answer 1

Without Installing python-docx

docx is basically is a zip file with several folders and files within it. In the link below you can find a simple function to extract the text from docx file, without the need to rely on python-docx and lxml the latter being sometimes hard to install:

http://etienned.github.io/posts/extract-text-from-word-docx-simply/

Answer 2

Using python-docx, as @Chinmoy Panda 's answer shows:

for para in doc.paragraphs:
    fullText.append(para.text)

However, para.text will lost the text in w:smarttag (Corresponding github issue is here: https://github.com/python-openxml/python-docx/issues/328), you should use the following function instead:

def para2text(p):
    rs = p._element.xpath('.//w:t')
    return u" ".join([r.text for r in rs])

Answer 3

you can try this also

from docx import Document

document = Document('demo.docx')
for para in document.paragraphs:
    print(para.text)

Answer 4

I had a similar issue so I found a workaround (remove hyperlink tags thanks to regular expressions so that only a paragraph tag remains). I posted this solution on https://github.com/python-openxml/python-docx/issues/85 BP

Answer 5

you can try this

import docx

def getText(filename):
    doc = docx.Document(filename)
    fullText = []
    for para in doc.paragraphs:
        fullText.append(para.text)
    return '\n'.join(fullText)

Answer 6

You can use python-docx2txt which is adapted from python-docx but can also extract text from links, headers and footers. It can also extract images.