Reading Word documents

Word documents (.docx) are another common kind of document that stores text. They are typically generated with Microsoft Office, but other tools also produce compatible files. They are probably the most common format to share files that need to be editable, but they are also common for distributing documents.

We'll see in this recipe how to extract text information from a Word document.

Getting ready

We'll use the python-docx module to read and process Word documents:

>>> echo "python-docx==0.8.6" >> requirements.txt
>>> pip install -r requirements.txt

We have prepared a test file, available in the GitHub Chapter04/documents directory, called document-1.docx...