How to retrieve the author of an office file in python?

Question

Title explains the problem, there are doc and docs files that which I want to retrieive their author information so that I can restructure my files.

os.stat returns only size and datetime, real-file related information.
open(filename, 'rb').read(200) returns many characters that I could not parse.

There is a module called xlrd for reading xlsx files. Yet, this still doesn't let me read doc or docx files. I am aware of new office files are not easily read on non-msoffice programs, so if that's impossible, gathering info from old office files would suffice.

Treacle

Does this have to work without Word installed? You could always use the Word COM object if there are n native libraries. – Metric

Since I am creating a utility script for myself, it doesn't have to, I can use it on windows and I'll be fine. But yet, I would like it to work on any platform w/o Word installed. So, my preferred choice would be no dependency on installed software. I'll check the COM object out also. – Dialogize

Answer 1

Since docx files are just zipped XML you could just unzip the docx file and presumably pull the author information out of an XML file. Not quite sure where it'd be stored, just looking around at it briefly leads me to suspect it's stored as dc:creator in docProps/core.xml.

Here's how you can open the docx file and retrieve the creator:

import zipfile, lxml.etree

# open zipfile
zf = zipfile.ZipFile('my_doc.docx')
# use lxml to parse the xml file we are interested in
doc = lxml.etree.fromstring(zf.read('docProps/core.xml'))
# retrieve creator
ns={'dc': 'http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/'}
creator = doc.xpath('//dc:creator', namespaces=ns)[0].text

Ia

Hi, sorry for reviving such an old post but how would you also check for membership? For instance if I want to check if subject exists apart from creator, how would I do it? Thanks in advance. – Noblewoman

@kstratis you probably should make a new question, and in that new question it could help to add a note that references this question. – Figurative

Answer 2

You can use COM interop to access the Word object model. This link talks about the technique: http://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/2010/07/16/python-and-microsoft-office-using-pywin32/

The secret when working with any of the office objects is knowing what item to access from the overwhelming amount of methods and properties. In this case each document has a list of BuiltInDocumentProperties . The property of interest is "Last Author".

After you open the document you will access the author with something like word.ActiveDocument.BuiltInDocumentProperties("Last Author")

Phantom

Answer 3

For old office documents (.doc, .xls) you can use hachoir-metadata.

It does not work well with the new file formats: for example, it can parse .xlsx files, but will not provide you with an Author name.

Dubitation

Answer 4

How about using docx library. You could pull more information about the file not only author.

#sudo pip install python-docx
#sudo pip2 install python-docx
#sudo pip3 install python-docx


import docx

file_name = 'file_path_name.doxs'

document = docx.Document(docx = file_name)
core_properties = document.core_properties
print(core_properties.author)
print(core_properties.created)
print(core_properties.last_modified_by)
print(core_properties.last_printed)
print(core_properties.modified)
print(core_properties.revision)
print(core_properties.title)
print(core_properties.category)
print(core_properties.comments)
print(core_properties.identifier)
print(core_properties.keywords)
print(core_properties.language)
print(core_properties.subject)
print(core_properties.version)
print(core_properties.keywords)
print(core_properties.content_status)

find more information about the docx library here and the github account is here

Rankin

Answer 5

The newer Office formats are just zip containers containing xml files. You can have a look here https://github.com/profHajal/Microsoft-Office-Documents-Metadata-with-Python/blob/main/mso_md.py for a very simple straightforward approach.

The code listed is easily extendable for OpenOffice formats.

Pseudocode:

z = zipfile.ZipFile(filename, 'r')
data = _zipfile.read('docProps/core.xml')
    or
data = _zipfile.read('meta.xml')
doc = xml.dom.minidom.parseString(data)
tag = "data you're interested in"
metadata_string = doc.getElementsByTagName(tag)[0].childNodes[0].data

---

Files to search metadata in:

• docProps/core.xml for MS Office files
• meta.xml for OpenOffice files

---

A non-exhaustive list of tags you can search for:

From the Dublin core namespace rules: dc

• Title: dc:title
• Creator (of most recent modification): dc:creator
• Description: dc:description
• Subject: dc:subject
• Date (last modified): dc:date
• Language: ???

From the ODF specification: meta

• Generator (creating software application): meta:generator
• Keywords: meta:keyword
• Initial Creator: ???
• Creation Date and Time: meta:creation-date
• Modification Date and Time: ???
• Print Date and Time: ???
• Document Template: meta:template (data in attributes)
• Document Statistics (word count, page count, etc.): meta:document-statistic (data in attributes)

MS Office specific:

• Creation Date and Time: dcterms:created
• Date (last modified): dcterms:modified
• Creator of most recent modification: cp:lastModifiedBy

Cheesewood