Mass Edit Word Documents Without Changing the Original Formatting

Edit Word documents effortlessly and without changing the original formatting of the document.

As great as the original docx library is, this "keep same format" feature is not natively supported. However, this functionality is pretty useful if you want to automate document writing or editing and need to adhere to strict formatting rules. Hence, I wrote this small add-on module.

Installing

With pip: pip install docxedit

Dependencies

Included as a dependency: python-docx

Functions

Most of the functions in this module work primarily with runs, which are sequences of strings with the same formatting style. This is how we can edit the document but keep the original format.

Example Usage

from docx import Document
import docxedit

document = Document()

# Replace all instances of the word 'Hello' in the document with 'Goodbye'
docxedit.replace_string(document, old_string='Hello', new_string='Goodbye')

# Replace all instances of the word 'Hello' in the document with 'Goodbye' but only
# up to paragraph 10
docxedit.replace_string_up_to_paragraph(document, old_string='Hello', new_string='Goodbye', 
                                        paragraph_number=10)

# Remove any line that contains the word 'Hello' along with the next 5 lines after that
docxedit.remove_lines(document, first_line='Hello', number_of_lines=5)