How can I search a word in a Word 2007 .docx file?

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I'd like to search a Word 2007 file (.docx) for a text string, e.g., "some special phrase" that could/would be found from a search within Word.

Is there a way from Python to see the text? I have no interest in formatting - I just want to classify documents as having or not having "some special phrase".

Shawnna answered 22/9, 2008 at 17:8 Comment(0)

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More exactly, a .docx document is a Zip archive in OpenXML format: you have first to uncompress it.
I downloaded a sample (Google: some search term filetype:docx) and after unzipping I found some folders. The word folder contains the document itself, in file document.xml.

Vitrification answered 22/9, 2008 at 17:22 Comment(1)

Ya i get all the xml file.Now i want to ask you that How can we get all the values like (bold,italic ,color,fonname,space ) and all the formatting setting ,How can we get this values from xml. – Frum 17/12, 2011 at 10:46

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After reading your post above, I made a 100% native Python docx module to solve this specific problem.

# Import the module
from docx import document, opendocx

# Open the .docx file
document = opendocx('A document.docx')

# Search returns true if found    
search(document,'your search string')

The docx module is at https://python-docx.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

Simone answered 30/12, 2009 at 12:8 Comment(13)

Wait... You wrote an entire module just for this question?! – Pecker 10/2, 2013 at 21:34

@Pecker Yes, I had the same problem as the poster, and all I could fine were horrible solutions for invoking .net or Java from Python. – Simone 11/2, 2013 at 10:20

If I knew how to give you my reputation points, I would award them for this -write-a-solution- answer! So I tweeted it instead. MAJOR THANKS! (total time to solve this problem: 25mins, thanks to someone writing the code for me) – Prussianism 28/3, 2013 at 15:35

I think nailer deserves a meme. "Good guy nailer. Sees that a friend is troubled with a code. Writes a library himself." – Ledesma 5/7, 2013 at 7:26

Since asterisk imports are an antipattern I'd suggest from docx import document, opendocx – Blagoveshchensk 13/2, 2019 at 20:49

Although I was searching for a C++ library, this is really a motivating answer... – Pointblank 30/4, 2019 at 9:45

opendocxand search doesn't work in Release v0.8.10. I couldn't find any Information about search. opendocx seems to be now Document. – Claudetta 24/4, 2020 at 8:21

What a legend. 😀 – Pennyweight 14/3, 2023 at 1:26

@MarcMaxmeister Are you along about bounties? stackoverflow.com/help/bounty (posting on social media is a win-win though) – Ahola 14/3, 2023 at 4:22

A post about this on r/programmerhumor has nearly 30k upvotes reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/11qbp1x/… – Stationer 14/3, 2023 at 7:15

@Stationer Thanks for the heads up! I've added a response on Reddit under the name "Otherwise-Ad7276". – Simone 14/3, 2023 at 10:8

Before if this got Historical Lock – Fernanda 14/3, 2023 at 12:43

gigachad energy – Prouty 19/3, 2023 at 12:43

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More exactly, a .docx document is a Zip archive in OpenXML format: you have first to uncompress it.
I downloaded a sample (Google: some search term filetype:docx) and after unzipping I found some folders. The word folder contains the document itself, in file document.xml.

Vitrification answered 22/9, 2008 at 17:22 Comment(1)

Ya i get all the xml file.Now i want to ask you that How can we get all the values like (bold,italic ,color,fonname,space ) and all the formatting setting ,How can we get this values from xml. – Frum 17/12, 2011 at 10:46

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In this example, "Course Outline.docx" is a Word 2007 document, which does contain the word "Windows", and does not contain the phrase "random other string".

>>> import zipfile
>>> z = zipfile.ZipFile("Course Outline.docx")
>>> "Windows" in z.read("word/document.xml")
True
>>> "random other string" in z.read("word/document.xml")
False
>>> z.close()

Basically, you just open the docx file (which is a zip archive) using zipfile, and find the content in the 'document.xml' file in the 'word' folder. If you wanted to be more sophisticated, you could then parse the XML, but if you're just looking for a phrase (which you know won't be a tag), then you can just look in the XML for the string.

Voice answered 22/9, 2008 at 23:12 Comment(1)

It's probably easier to look for the phrase in the element text (using an XML parser) than having to worry about whether part of your text is matched by an element name. – Simone 27/12, 2009 at 12:59

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A problem with searching inside a Word document XML file is that the text can be split into elements at any character. It will certainly be split if formatting is different, for example as in Hello World. But it can be split at any point and that is valid in OOXML. So you will end up dealing with XML like this even if formatting does not change in the middle of the phrase!

<w:p w:rsidR="00C07F31" w:rsidRDefault="003F6D7A">

<w:r w:rsidRPr="003F6D7A">

<w:rPr>

<w:b /> 

</w:rPr>

<w:t>Hello</w:t> 

</w:r>

<w:r>

<w:t xml:space="preserve">World.</w:t> 

</w:r>

</w:p>

You can of course load it into an XML DOM tree (not sure what this will be in Python) and ask to get text only as a string, but you could end up with many other "dead ends" just because the OOXML spec is around 6000 pages long and MS Word can write lots of "stuff" you don't expect. So you could end up writing your own document processing library.

Or you can try using Aspose.Words.

It is available as .NET and Java products. Both can be used from Python. One via COM Interop another via JPype. See Aspose.Words Programmers Guide, Utilize Aspose.Words in Other Programming Languages (sorry I can't post a second link, stackoverflow does not let me yet).

Nurserymaid answered 15/11, 2009 at 11:1 Comment(1)

OOXML spec is around 6000 pages long : You've got to be kidding me :O – Cloninger 26/12, 2012 at 20:0

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You can use docx2txt to get the text inside the docx, than search in that txt

npm install -g docx2txt
docx2txt input.docx # This will  print the text to stdout

Khotan answered 9/12, 2014 at 10:51 Comment(0)

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A docx is just a zip archive with lots of files inside. Maybe you can look at some of the contents of those files? Other than that you probably have to find a lib that understands the word format so that you can filter out things you're not interested in.

A second choice would be to interop with word and do the search through it.

Levitate answered 22/9, 2008 at 17:16 Comment(0)

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a docx file is essentially a zip file with an xml inside it.
the xml contains the formatting but it also contains the text.

Constituent answered 22/9, 2008 at 17:17 Comment(0)

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OLE Automation would probably be the easiest. You have to consider formatting, because the text could look like this in the XML:

<b>Looking <i>for</i> this <u>phrase</u>

There's no easy way to find that using a simple text scan.

Zombie answered 22/9, 2008 at 23:3 Comment(0)

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You should be able to use the MSWord ActiveX interface to extract the text to search (or, possibly, do the search). I have no idea how you access ActiveX from Python though.

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