Extract text from Word files (docx) simply

Etienne Desautels — Tue, 26 Nov 2013 10:01:59 GMT

If you want to extract the text content of a Word file there are a few solutions to do this in Python. Unfortunately most of these solutions have dependencies or need to run an external command in a subprocess or are heavy/complex, using an office suite, etc. I find that the best solution among those in the Stackoverflow page is python-docx. But using it bring two dependencies: python-docx itself and lxml. Installing python-docx is not a big problem. Unfortunately lxml is sometimes hard to install or, at the minimum, requires compilation.

To avoid that, inspired by python-docx, I created a simple function to extract text from .docx files that do not require dependencies, using only the standard library. So it’s easy to incorporate it in any Python project.

Is there any way to improve it?

try: from xml.etree.cElementTree import XML except ImportError: from xml.etree.ElementTree import XML import zipfile """ Module that extract text from MS XML Word document (.docx). (Inspired by python-docx <https://github.com/mikemaccana/python-docx>) """ WORD_NAMESPACE = '{http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main}' PARA = WORD_NAMESPACE + 'p' TEXT = WORD_NAMESPACE + 't' def get_docx_text(path): """ Take the path of a docx file as argument, return the text in unicode. """ document = zipfile.ZipFile(path) xml_content = document.read('word/document.xml') document.close() tree = XML(xml_content) paragraphs = [] for paragraph in tree.getiterator(PARA): texts = [node.text for node in paragraph.getiterator(TEXT) if node.text] if texts: paragraphs.append(''.join(texts)) return '\n\n'.join(paragraphs)

Using a Raspberry Pi as an air exchanger controller

Etienne Desautels — Sat, 23 Nov 2013 10:30:03 GMT

The Margarita project

This project’s goal is to build a controller for my house’s air exchanger that will optimize its utilization. It will take into account exterior and interior temperature and humidity to decide what the exchanger should do. In a second time I will add a web/phone interface to access and set the controller. In fact, I have a lot of other ideas and goals, but better to not make too many promises!

Etienne’s blog

Extract text from Word files (docx) simply

Using a Raspberry Pi as an air exchanger controller

The Margarita project