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 opendocx function but in readthedocs they are using Document class. Even they are only showing how to add text to a docx file not reading existing one?

1st one (opendocx) is not working, may be deprecated. For second case I was trying to use:

from docx import Document

document = Document('test_doc.docx')

print document.paragraphs

It returned a list of <docx.text.Paragraph object at 0x... >

Then I did:

for p in document.paragraphs:
    print p.text

It returned all text but there were few thing missing. All URLs (CTRL+CLICK to go to URL) were not present in text on console.

What is the issue? Why URLs are missing?

How could I get complete text without iterating over loop (something like open().read())

Answer 1

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 2

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.

Answer 3

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 need to install python-docx and lxml which sometimes create problem:

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

Answer 4

There are two "generations" of python-docx. The initial generation ended with the 0.2.x versions and the "new" generation started at v0.3.0. The new generation is a ground-up, object-oriented rewrite of the legacy version. It has a distinct repository located here.

The opendocx() function is part of the legacy API. The documentation is for the new version. The legacy version has no documentation to speak of.

Neither reading nor writing hyperlinks are supported in the current version. That capability is on the roadmap, and the project is under active development. It turns out to be quite a broad API because Word has so much functionality. So we'll get to it, but probably not in the next month unless someone decides to focus on that aspect and contribute it.

Answer 5

you can try this also

from docx import Document

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

Answer 6

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 7

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