Extracting data from tables

[BeebBenjamin]

Hi,

Is it possible to extract data from tables using the docx module?

It would be useful to have more examples with regards to learning to use this library.

Regards,

Ben

[scanny]

If you can say a bit more about your use case that would be helpful to inform future feature design. Also it will probably enable me to offer more specific advice.

In general the current approach would be to iterate over the cells and then iterate over the paragraphs sequence for each of the cells. The paragraphs in a table cell are just like the ones found elsewhere in Word. So something like this might work for you:

for row in table.rows:
    for cell in row.cells:
        for paragraph in cell.paragraphs:
            print paragraph.text

http://python-docx.readthedocs.org/en/latest/api/table.html#docx.table._Cell.paragraphs
http://python-docx.readthedocs.org/en/latest/api/text.html#docx.text.Paragraph

[BeebBenjamin]

Thanks for the reply.

I have a word document with a series of tables in it. I want to extract just the tables and export them to CSV file.

At the moment using your module I can get a list of the tables in the file using the following:

tblList = document.xpath('//w:tbl', namespaces=document.nsmap)

Now, I do not know what to do with this list. I don't know how to grab the table and use it as an object so that I can iterate through it's elements.

[scanny]

Which version are you using? I can't see how the line of code you're using would work with this version of python-docx. Can you provide a few lines of context code?

[scanny]

@BeebBenjamin if you install python-docx (v0.3.0+) rather than docx (v0.2.x) there is API I think you can use for this, roughly like so:

document = Document(path_to_your_docx)
tables = document.tables
for table in tables:
    for row in table.rows:
        for cell in row.cells:
            for paragraph in cell.paragraphs:
                print(paragraph.text)

To get the right version installed you might need to do this:

$ pip uninstall docx
$ pip install -U --pre python-docx

The documentation you reference above is for this latest version. The legacy version doesn't have any documentation beyond the README.txt. Note the two versions are in separate repositories. This repository is for the latest one. The legacy version is here: https://github.com/mikemaccana/python-docx

Let me know if it gives you trouble.

[BeebBenjamin]

@scanny thanks for the help with this. I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "OpenDocs.py", line 9, in
print(cell.text)
AttributeError: unreadable attribute

Thanks

[scanny]

Hmm, weird, it seems to have saved an earlier revision of my comment. What you want is:

...
    for cell in row.cells:
        for paragraph in cell.paragraphs:
            print paragraph.text

I'll edit the code above to show the change.

[BeebBenjamin]

Yes, that has fixed it. Thanks so much for your help and your development of this tool!

[scanny]

You're welcome @BeebBenjamin; glad you're finding it useful :)

[abruski]

What this does is print/return every cell on a new line. Is it possible to print/return every cell belonging to the same row on one line?

[abruski]

I worked it out. Might not be the best solution.

import sys
from docx import Document

file = sys.argv[1]
document = Document(file)
tables = document.tables
for row in tables[2].rows:
    print row.cells[0].paragraphs[0].text + row.cells[2].paragraphs[0].text

substitute list indexes where needed.

[divyaiyer]

@scanny - Is there any way I can extract tables with a custom name I had given in my template?
Use case : Parsing a docx file and storing values in to database, docx contains lot of tables, but I want to extract only the tables with the style name 'docReader_Tables'. Is this possible? Thanks in advance.

[scanny]

Hi @divyaiyer, you might want to post this one on StackOverflow if you have a login there. It's more of a support question than a code issue.

I do think you'll need to provide a bit more detail.

Off the top of my head, tables have a different type of style than say paragraphs, if I remember correctly, and are specified by a GUID rather than a name. So that part doesn't make sense to me. The tables are available in Document.tables, so you can iterate through them that way once you have the test worked out to identify the one you want.

[divyaiyer]

Thnx for your reply @scanny . I shall post on stackOverflow, I do have an account. Ya my case is bit tricky, as I have a particular paragraph heading and I want to fetch all tables comes under that heading and store in database. Thnx

[scanny]

If your test for inclusion is following a heading paragraph, you'll need to iterate over both paragraphs and tables in document order. The document.iter_block_level_items() method is designed for that (although it hasn't been officially implemented yet.

You may want to check out this issue that has details on that.
#40