Reading and Writing MS Word Files in Python via Python-Docx Module
The MS Word utility from Microsoft Office suite is one of the most commonly used tools for writing text documents, both simple and complex. Though humans can easily read and write MS Word documents, assuming you have the Office software installed, often times you need to read text from Word documents within another application.
For instance, if you are developing a natural language processing application in Python that takes MS Word files as input, you will need to read MS Word files in Python before you can process the text. Similarly, often times you need to write text to MS Word documents as output, which could be a dynamically generated report to download, for example.
In this article, article you will see how to read and write MS Word files in Python.
Installing Python-Docx Library
Several libraries exist that can be used to read and write MS Word files in Python. However, we will be using the python-docx module owing to its ease-of-use. Execute the following pip command in your terminal to download the python-docx module as shown below:
$ pip install python-docx