Best way to extract text from a Word doc without using COM/automation?

Question

Is there a reasonable way to extract plain text from a Word file that doesn't depend on COM automation? (This is a a feature for a web app deployed on a non-Windows platform - that's non-negotiable in this case.)

Antiword seems like it might be a reasonable option, but it seems like it might be abandoned.

A Python solution would be ideal, but doesn't appear to be available.

Answer 1

(Same answer as extracting text from MS word files in python)

Use the native Python docx module which I made this week. Here's how to extract all the text from a doc:

document = opendocx('Hello world.docx')  # This location is where most document content lives  docbody = document.xpath('/w:document/w:body', namespaces=wordnamespaces)[0]  # Extract all text print getdocumenttext(document) 

See Python DocX site

100% Python, no COM, no .net, no Java, no parsing serialized XML with regexs.

Answer 2

I use catdoc or antiword for this, whatever gives the result that is the easiest to parse. I have embedded this in python functions, so it is easy to use from the parsing system (which is written in python).

import os  def doc_to_text_catdoc(filename):     (fi, fo, fe) = os.popen3('catdoc -w "%s"' % filename)     fi.close()     retval = fo.read()     erroroutput = fe.read()     fo.close()     fe.close()     if not erroroutput:         return retval     else:         raise OSError("Executing the command caused an error: %s" % erroroutput)  # similar doc_to_text_antiword() 

The -w switch to catdoc turns off line wrapping, BTW.