docxtools

A command-line utility to work with docx files. Can be useful for unix stream-based operations such as searching through a large amount of docx files on the commandline. It can also be useful for batch operations.

docxtools is written in Rust, platform-specific binary downloads can be found in the Release area: https://github.com/coderthoughts/docxtools/releases

Usage

General usage:

$ ./docxtools --help
A command-line tool to work with docx files, for example to make bulk-changes in them without the need to open a word processor.

Usage: docxtools [OPTIONS] <IN_FILE> <COMMAND>

Commands:
  cat            List the text from the document to the console
  links          List the links in the document to the console
  grep           Search the text in the document
  replace        Search and replace in document text and tables
  replace-links  Search and replace hyperlinks in the document
  style-change   Change styles inside the document
  help           Print this message or the help of the given subcommand(s)

Arguments:
  <IN_FILE>  The docx file to operate on

Options:
  -t, --temp-dir <TEMP_DIR>  The temporary directory to use. If not specified a system temp directory will be used and cleaned after use
  -h, --help                 Print help
  -V, --version              Print version

Example usage:

List text contents of a docx file

$ docxtools docs/test.docx cat
docs/test.docx: Normal.dotm
...
docs/test.docx: Microsoft Office Word
...
docs/test.docx: 2023-08-25T10:13:00Z
docs/test.docx: A test document written in Microsoft Word.

Search a directory of docx files for a specific text

The grep subcommand supports regex syntax to find text.

$ find docs/folder -name "*.docx" -exec docxtools {} grep '[tT]ext' \;
docs/folder/sample1.docx: text
docs/folder/sample1.docx: Text
docs/folder/sample2.docx: This is a different file that also contains some textual content.

Replace all occurrences of a word with another

Change the word 'Test' or 'test' into zzzz and write the modifications to a new file test_mod1.docx:

$ docxtools docs/test.docx replace '[Tt]est' zzzz docs/test_mod1.docx

Replace all occurrences of a hyperlink with another

Replace all occurrences of https://main--test--hlxsites.hlx.page with https://foo.bar.com. Any subpaths after the URLs are kept, so https://main--test--hlxsites.hlx.page/contact will become https://foo.bar.com/contact.

$ docxtools docs/links.docx replace-links https://main--test--hlxsites.hlx.page https://foo.bar.com

It's also possible to use capture groups in the regular expressions and replacements. For example let's say you want to replace all links of either http: or https: from www.example.com to http(s)://www.foo.bar/ but not any other URLs and you want to keep the protocol intact.

For this you can use the usual Regular Expression capturing groups (brackets) and references to these with the $<group#> syntax:

find docs -name "*.docx" -exec ./docxtools {} replace-links '(http[s]?)://www.example.com/' '$1://www.foo.bar/' \;

Change all occurrences of Heading 2 to Heading 1

Replace all occurrences of a certain style with a different one, for example, to replace all 'Heading 2' occurrences in a document execute the following style-change command:

$ docxtools mydoc.docx style-change 'Heading 2' 'Heading 1'