Best Way to Process a Word Document [closed]

Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.

---

We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.

Closed 4 years ago.

Improve this question

I receive word docu开发者_StackOverflow中文版ments with specified formating corresponding to the data that is in them. For example, all headers have the exact same formating (Times New Roman-Font 14-Bold).

What is the best way to process such MS Word documents (.doc or .docx) into xml documents? Language is not an issue (I'll use Lisp/Boost.Spirit if I have to!).

---

Take a look at the python-docx library.

---

So I think you're saying that the structure of the document is encoded in the formatting, and you want to produce XML files that capture that structure, whilst keeping the content in plain text?

If that is so you will need to parse the documents, and build a data structure that can be processed, then dumped out as XML.

For parsing, there are a few options. Microsoft have published the specifications for their binary .doc format, the reading of which will be essential to write a parser for it. In the case of .docx you're a little more lucky, as it's already in XML format, so you could use any XML parsing library to read in the file, then search through the resulting tree for the data you are interested in. XML parsers are available for pretty much any language, one easy to use one that comes to mind is MiniDom for Python.

For generating your output XML, again an object-representation to XML library seems to be the way to go, MiniDom for example, does that too.

If you don't want to deal with writing your own .doc parser, you could run the documents through a converter that produces are more accessible format first - such as using Word itself to convert the .doc files to .docx, or a tool that produces RDFs from .docs, or you could use an existing word parser such as the one in OpenOffice.

---

Used a very inefficient conditional search in VBA to literally copy the document into a second document. The second document was then saved with a .xml extension. Got the job done, but its ugly.

---

You can also try Java based Apache POI - HWPF. It supports text extraction. You will then have to create you own XML doc, Caster XML or Xstream can help you on that issue.

---

It really depends on exactly what you are trying to do.

The simplest approach would be to save the document as Flat OPC XML (in Word, "Save as.." XML), and then apply an XSLT.

This approach is simplest, since it gives you the entire docx as a single XML file, so you don't have to unzip it etc.

If your requirements are more complex, for example, analyzing the formatting or styles, or doing something with hyperlinks, then an object model such as docx4j (Java) or Open XML SDK (C#) - and no doubt there are others - may help.