Question

I want to make some simple edits on a Word document, eg replace all TEXT with text.

I have tried python-docx, but it doesn’t let me save only my changes. Instead it makes a new document with default style and saves it with my content.

Is there a good library(Python or other languages) that supports quick edits on docx?

Answer 1

Little bit of why you are not able to do simple string replace in docx – a .docx document is a Zip archive in OpenXML format: you have first to uncompress it. Earlier I used to use zip to unzip the docx & then search for the text, like so –

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

But later I found this excellent python library for docx – Python-docx which will solve your problem.

# Import the module
from docx import *

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

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