3
votes

I am working with a bunch of word documents in which I have text (words) that are highlighted (using color codes e.g. yellow,blue,gray), now I want to extract the highlighted words associated with each color. I am programming in Python. Here is what I have done currently:

opened the word document with [python-docx][1] and then get to the <w:r> tag which contains the tokens (words) in the document. I have used following code:

#!/usr/bin/env python2.6
# -*- coding: ascii -*-
from docx import *
document = opendocx('test.docx')
words = document.xpath('//w:r', namespaces=document.nsmap)
for word in words:
  print word

Now I am stuck at the part where I check for each word if it has <w:highlight> tag and extract the color code from it and if it matches to yellow print text inside <w:t> tag. I will really appreciate if someone can point me towards extracting the word from the parsed file.

1

1 Answers

4
votes

I had never before worked with python-docx, but what helped was that I found a snippet online of how the XML structure of a highlighted piece of text lookls like:

 <w:r>
    <w:rPr>
      <w:highlight w:val="yellow"/>
    </w:rPr>
    <w:t>text that is highlighted</w:t>
  </w:r>

From there, it was relatively straightforward to come up with this:

from docx import *
document = opendocx(r'test.docx')
words = document.xpath('//w:r', namespaces=document.nsmap)

WPML_URI = "{http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main}"
tag_rPr = WPML_URI + 'rPr'
tag_highlight = WPML_URI + 'highlight'
tag_val = WPML_URI + 'val'

for word in words:
    for rPr in word.findall(tag_rPr):
        if rPr.find(tag_highlight).attrib[tag_val] == 'yellow':
            print word.find(tag_t).text