2017-07-09 18:13:41 -06:00
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---
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title: Converting docx to text with unzip and sed
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2022-09-04 16:59:13 -06:00
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section: computing
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2017-07-09 18:13:41 -06:00
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---
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2010-07-13 16:37:13 -06:00
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Periodically people email me Microsoft Word files which clearly contain
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only text. Fortunately, Word is now creating OOXML `.docx` files which
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contain honest to goodness UTF-8 text (and lots of XML tags). This is a
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step up from the `.doc` format which as near as I could tell needed
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special libraries to penetrate.
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`.docx` files are zip archives. The archived file `word/document.xml`
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contains the text of the document itself and can be extracted with
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`unzip file.docx word/document.xml`.
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If you just want to see the text in a .docx file, you can strip out all
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XML tags of `word/document.xml`, converting the P tag to a new
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paragraph. It's surprisingly legible for every .docx file I've seen so
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far. The sed command would be `s#</w:p>#\n\n#g;s#<[^>]*>##g`.
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I made a shell script called `docx2txt` which contains the unzip command
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to pipe to stdout, which is read by sed running that crazy script. It
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looks like this:
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#! /bin/sh
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unzip -qc "$1" word/document.xml | sed 's#</w:p>#\n\n#g;s#<[^>]*>##g'
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2010-09-21 22:44:01 -06:00
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There are other, probably more powerful, docx to text converters on the
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Internet. The advantage of mine is simplicity, when all you want to do
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is read the text and move on with your life.
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