Convert .docx to HTML using JAVA

Asked 9/7, 2014 at 11:51 Answered 18/4, 2019 at 7:7

I tried converting .doc to HTML by using WordToHtmlConverter and it worked perfectly.

But when i tried to convert .docx to HTML, i got stuck with it.

What i tried:

I used the below code to convert .docx to HTML:

The code which i tried from : How to use Tika's XWPFWordExtractorDecorator class?

        InputStream input = TikaInputStream.get(new File("C:\\Users\\Downloads\\filename.docx"));


        Parser parser = new AutoDetectParser();


        StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
        SAXTransformerFactory factory = (SAXTransformerFactory)
                 SAXTransformerFactory.newInstance();
        TransformerHandler handler = factory.newTransformerHandler();
        handler.getTransformer().setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.METHOD, "html");
        handler.getTransformer().setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");
        handler.setResult(new StreamResult(sw));


        try {
            Metadata metadata = new Metadata();
            parser.parse(input, handler, metadata, new ParseContext());
            String xml = sw.toString();
            System.out.print("tika : "+xml); 
        } finally {
            input.close();
        }

The output what i got is,

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title/>
</head>
<body/>
</html>

Please explain where i gone wrong?
Is there any better way to convert .docx to html string

Appreciate your help, Thanks

Jason answered 9/7, 2014 at 11:51 Comment(7)

According to the documentation poi.apache.org/apidocs/org/apache/poi/hwpf/converter/… this API is meant to be used up to Word 2007 when there were only .doc . So it won't work for .docx with this API. Try so save your document in .doc – Metaprotein 9/7, 2014 at 11:57

@singe31 you dint get my point. I have converted .doc to html by using hwpf converter. But im trying to do it for .docx, is there a way? – Jason 9/7, 2014 at 12:2

code.google.com/p/xdocreport/wiki/XWPFConverterXHTML – Metaprotein 9/7, 2014 at 12:5

At their simplest .docx files are an archive (you can open them with something like 7zip and view the contents) containing a bunch of XML files. With that in mind, you'd want to use something that can transform the XML into HTML. – Forequarter 9/7, 2014 at 12:8

You could also take a look on Pandoc or any other command line tool from Java. These tasks are not that trivial and I'm not sure if there's a a working API out there for that other than POI ATM. – Vincent 9/7, 2014 at 12:24

i figured it out by using the link : code.google.com/p/xdocreport/wiki/XWPFConverterXHTML. i'll just post it as answer, it might help someone. Thank you all for your sugesstions. – Jason 9/7, 2014 at 12:33

You can use docx4j for that, see the example: github.com/plutext/docx4j/blob/master/src/samples/docx4j/org/… – Hedonic 11/4, 2017 at 23:11

This code worked for me to convert .docx to html:

You can also look at the link : Link to code

       //convert .docx to HTML string
        InputStream in= new FileInputStream(new File(path));
        XWPFDocument document = new XWPFDocument(in);


        XHTMLOptions options = XHTMLOptions.create().URIResolver(new FileURIResolver(new File("word/media")));

        OutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();


        XHTMLConverter.getInstance().convert(document, out, options);
        String html=out.toString();
        System.out.println(html);

Jason answered 9/7, 2014 at 12:37 Comment(6)

Could anyone provide an updated example please? The reference does not work anymore. Thanks. – Edith 15/12, 2016 at 19:16

I was getting problem using this code, as I was not able to get the jar for XHTMLOptions, XHTMLConverter and FileURIResolver and then when I searched I got these jars here "org.apache.poi.xwpf.converter.core-1.0.6.jar", "org.apache.poi.xwpf.converter.xhtml-1.0.6.jar" and "ooxml-schemas-1.1.jar", if you use these jars you will not get any kind of error with the above code – Bearwood 17/1, 2017 at 13:12

@Vipul here you have dependency with it mvnrepository.com/artifact/fr.opensagres.xdocreport/… – Nubilous 10/7, 2017 at 8:15

Thanks all for saving my time. – Eastward 31/1, 2018 at 13:32

I have followed the above code it's converting docx to html. But i didn't get border styles which are applied in my docx!!. Any idea?????? – Aachen 23/2, 2018 at 6:52

Images are not working in my case. Is there a fix for it? – Fragonard 28/8, 2020 at 8:21

You may want to make use of Mammoth docx to HTML library.Its a library for displaying doc, docx documents by converting them to html on the browser side as well as can be handled on the backend.

Library Supports - JavaScript, both the browser and node.js. Available on npm. Python. Available on PyPI. WordPress. Java/JVM. Available on Maven Central. .NET. Available on NuGet.
Link: https://mike.zwobble.org/projects/mammoth/ (Demo and Article)
Github: https://github.com/mwilliamson/mammoth.js

Ranzini answered 18/4, 2019 at 7:7 Comment(0)

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