Read .doc file with python

Question

I got a test for job application, my deal is read some .doc files. Does anyone know a library to do this? I had started with a raw python code:

f = open('test.doc', 'r') f.read() 

but this does not return a friendly string I need to convert it to utf-8

Edit: I just want get the text from this file

Answer 1

One can use the textract library. It take care of both "doc" as well as "docx"

import textract text = textract.process("path/to/file.extension") 

You can even use 'antiword' (sudo apt-get install antiword) and then convert doc to first into docx and then read through docx2txt.

antiword filename.doc > filename.docx 

Ultimately, textract in the backend is using antiword.

Answer 2

You can use python-docx2txt library to read text from Microsoft Word documents. It is an improvement over python-docx library as it can, in addition, extract text from links, headers and footers. It can even extract images.

You can install it by running: pip install docx2txt.

Let's download and read the first Microsoft document on here:

import docx2txt my_text = docx2txt.process("test.docx") print(my_text) 

Here is a screenshot of the Terminal output the above code:

EDIT:

This does NOT work for .doc files. The only reason I am keep this answer is that it seems there are people who find it useful for .docx files.