How to Read a Microsoft Word Document with Python



Python


In this article, we explain how to read a Microsoft Word document with Python.

So a plaintext file such as a text file is much different than a document such as Microsoft Word.

Microsoft Word is a much more complex type of file that can hold pictures, tables, and many other various types of data.

Plaintext just holds text.

Thus, reading a Microsoft Word document is a much more complex undertaking than reading a plain text file, which is simple.

We can read a Microsoft Word document by using the python-docx module.

The python-docx module is a module that allows for easy working with Microsoft Word files (.docx files).

To install the python-docx module, use the statement, pip install python-docx

Then to import this module into your code, you have to use the statement, import docx

So we use this module to read a Microsoft Word document with Python.

This is shown in the code below.



So this is very simple code.

We first import the python-docx module using the statement, import docx

We then open up the Word document that we want to. This is done with the line, doc= docx.Document('file1.docx')

The file we are opening up is file1.docx

We then create an empty string and call this wholedoc.

What this wholedoc variable will do is it will store each paragraph in the Word document.

We then create a for loop that goes through each paragraph in the Word document and appends the paragraph to the wholedoc string.

This way, we have every paragraph in the Word document.

Because everything in Word is represented as a paragraph, by reading all of the paragraphs with a for loop, we can read the entire Word document.

And this is how we can read a Microsoft Word document with Python using the python-docx module.


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