/python-docx

Reads, queries and modifies Microsoft Word 2007/2008 docx files.

Primary LanguagePythonMIT LicenseMIT

Python docx

Introduction

The docx module creates, reads and writes Microsoft Office Word 2007 docx files.

These are referred to as 'WordML', 'Office Open XML' and 'Open XML' by Microsoft.

These documents can be opened in Microsoft Office 2007 / 2010, Microsoft Mac Office 2008, Google Docs, OpenOffice.org 3, and Apple iWork 08.

They also validate as well formed XML.

The module was created when I was looking for a Python support for MS Word .doc files, but could only find various hacks involving COM automation, calling .net or Java, or automating OpenOffice or MS Office.

The docx module has the following features:

Making documents

Features for making documents include:

  • Paragraphs
  • Bullets
  • Numbered lists
  • Document properties (author, company, etc)
  • Multiple levels of headings
  • Tables
  • Section and page breaks
  • Images

Editing documents

Thanks to the awesomeness of the lxml module, we can:

  • Search and replace
  • Extract plain text of document
  • Add and delete items anywhere within the document
  • Change document properties
  • Run xpath queries against particular locations in the document - useful for retrieving data from user-completed templates.

Getting started

Making and Modifying Documents

example-makedocument.py

Congratulations, you just made and then modified a Word document!

Alternatively, if you have setuptools and pip, you can run pip install docx to install the package and its dependencies, and download example-makedocument.py and example-extracttext.py to test them out. Note that lxml requires that libxml2-dev and libxslt1-dev are installed.

Extracting Text from a Document

If you just want to extract the text from a Word file, run:

example-extracttext.py 'Some word file.docx' 'new file.txt'

Ideas & To Do List

  • Further improvements to image handling
  • Document health checks
  • Egg
  • Markdown conversion support

We love forks, changes and pull requests!

  • Check out the HACKING to add your own changes!
  • For this project on github
  • Send a pull request via github and we'll add your changes!

Want to talk? Need help?

Email python.docx@librelist.com.

License

Licensed under the MIT license Short version: this code is copyrighted to me (Mike MacCana), I give you permission to do what you want with it except remove my name from the credits. See the LICENSE file for specific terms.