I am trying to preform find and replace on docx files, whilst still maintaining formatting.
From reading up on this, the best way seems to be preforming the find/replace on the xml file of the document.
I can load in the xml file and find/replace on it, but unsure how to write it back.
docx:
Hello {text}!
python:
import zipfile
zip = zipfile.ZipFile(open('test.docx', 'rb'))
xmlString = zip.read('word/document.xml').decode('utf-8')
xmlString.replace('{text}', 'world')
What you are trying is dangerous, because you are processing a high lever docx file at a lower level. If you really want to do it, just use the hints from overwriting file in ziparchive as suggested by #shahvishal.
But unless you fully know all the details of docx format, my advice is : do not do that. Suppose there is for any reason in an internal field or attribute the string {text}. You are likely to change the file in an unexpected way leading immediately or even worse later to the destruction of the file (Word being no longer able to process it).
If you do your processing on a Windows machine with an installed word, you certainly could try to use automation to process the file with Microsoft Word. Unfortunately, I only did that long time ago and cannot give useful links. You will need:
general knowledge on pywin30 module
sufficient knowledge on the Automation interface of MS/WORD. Hopefully, its documentation is nice with many examples provided you have a full installation of Microsoft Office including macro help
You're really going to want to use a library for reading/writing docx files rather than trying to just deal with them as raw XML. A cursory search came up with the pypi module docx but I haven't used this module so I can't endorse it:
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/docx/0.2.4
I've had the (unfortunate) experience of dealing with the manipulation of MS Office documents from other programming languages, and spending the time to find good libraries really paid off.
The old saying goes "don't reinvent the wheel" and I think that's definitely true when manipulating non-trivial file formats. If a somewhat mature library exists to do the job, use it!
You would need to replace the file in the zip archive. There is no "simple" way of achieving this. The following is a question that should help:
overwriting file in ziparchive
Related
I've been looking for a fast and relatively easy way of searching (grep-ish) for user-defined strings in files of varying formats, i.e xlsx, docx, pptx, pdf using Python.
My research has led me to believe that there might not be a convenient way of doing this, as per a single module or similar. Am I forced to use a separate module for each file type? And if so are these approriate?
docx
openpyxl
pptx
slate
I also looked at forms of decompression to get to the xml-files containing actual text but it seems unwieldy. I just want to be sure that there is no simple, uniform way of handling all of these different filetypes.
Well, I've mostly figured it out. In the end I decided to use powershell combined with "itextsharp.dll" to process the files. It turned out to be simpler than using portable python. Thanks for the answers:-)
I want to enter data into a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet, and for that data to interact and write itself to other documents and webforms.
With success, I am pulling data from an Excel spreadsheet using xlwings. Right now, I’m stuck working with .docx files. The goal here is to write the Excel data into specific parts of a Microsoft Word .docx file template and create a new file.
My specific question is:
Can you modify just a text string(s) in a word/document.xml file and still maintain the integrity and functionality of its .docx encasement? It seems that there are numerous things that can change in the XML code when making even the slightest change to a Word document. I've been working with python-docx and lxml, but I'm not sure if what I seek to do is possible via this route.
Any suggestions or experiences to share would be greatly appreciated. I feel I've read every article that is easily discoverable through a google search at least 5 times.
Let me know if anything needs clarification.
Some things to note:
I started getting into coding about 2 months ago. I’ve been doing it intensively for that time and I feel I’m picking up the essential concepts, but there are severe gaps in my knowledge.
Here are my tools:
Yosemite 10.10,
Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac
You probably need to be more specific, but the short answer is, in principle, yes.
At a certain level, all python-docx does is modify strings in the XML. A couple things though:
The XML you create needs to remain well-formed and valid according to the schema. So if you change the text enclosed in a <w:t> element, for example, that works fine. Conversely, if you inject a bunch of random XML at an arbitrary point in one of the .xml parts, that will corrupt the file.
The XML "files", known as parts that make up a .docx file are contained in a Zip archive known as a package. You must unpackage and repackage that set of parts properly in order to have a valid .docx file afterward. python-docx takes care of all those details for you, but if you're going directly at the .docx file you'll need to take care of that yourself.
I'm developing using Python and Django for a website. I want to take a BibTex entry and output it in a view in 3 different formats, MLA, APA, and Chicago. Is there a library out there that already does this or am I going to have to manually do the string formatting?
There are the following projects:
BibtexParser
Pybtex
Pybliographer
BabyBib
If you need complex parsing and output, Pybtex is recommended. Example:
>>> from pybtex.database.input import bibtex
>>> parser = bibtex.Parser()
>>> bib_data = parser.parse_file('examples/foo.bib')
>>> bib_data.entries.keys()
[u'ruckenstein-diffusion', u'viktorov-metodoj', u'test-inbook', u'test-booklet']
>>> print bib_data.entries['ruckenstein-diffusion'].fields['title']
Predicting the Diffusion Coefficient in Supercritical Fluids
Good luck.
Having tried them, all of these projects are bad, for various reasons: terrible APIs, bad documentation, and a failure to parse valid BibTeX files. The implementation you want doesn't show up in most Google searches, from my own searching: it's biblib. This text from the README should sell it:
There are a lot of BibTeX parsers out there. Most of them are complete nonsense based on some imaginary grammar made up by the module's author that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike BibTeX's actual grammar. BibTeX has a grammar. It's even pretty simple, though it's probably not what you think it is. The hardest part of BibTeX's grammar is that it's only written down in one place: the BibTeX source code.
The accepted answer of using pybtex is fraught with danger as Pybtex does not preserve the bibtex format of even simple bibtex files. (https://bitbucket.org/pybtex-devs/pybtex/issues/130/need-to-specially-represent-bibtex-markup)
Pybtex is therefore losing bibtex information when reading and re-writing a simple .bib file without making any changes. Users should be very careful following the recommendations to use pybtex.
I will try biblib as well and report back but the accepted answer should be edited to not recommend pybtex.
Edit:
I was able to import the data using Bibtex Parser, without any loss of data. However, I had to compile from https://github.com/sciunto-org/python-bibtexparser as the version installed via pip was bugged at the time. Users should verify that pip is getting the latest version.
As for exporting, once the data has been imported via BibTex Parser, it's in a dictionary, and can be exported as the user desires. BibTex Parser does not have built in functions for exporting in common formats. As I did not need this functionality, I didn't specifically test it. However, once imported into a dictionary, the string output can be converted to any citation format rather easily.
Here, pybtex and a custom style file can help. I used the style file provided by the journal and compiled in LaTeX instead, but PyBtex has python style files (but also allows ingesting .sty files). So I would recommend taking the Bibtex Parser input and transferring it to PyBtex (or similar) for outputting in a certain style.
The closest thing I know of is the pybtex package
I'm wanting to use PyPDF2 (source, docs), but first wanted to make sure that it would be safe to use. I'm unable to find anything in it's docs. I want to use it to make sure that uploaded files are valid PDFs. Users are validated, but I'm concerned about them still being able to unknowingly upload something unsafe. Is there any way that PyPDF2 would be able to tell, even if it is a PDF, that it is unsafe?
Is there any way that PyPDF2 would be able to tell, even if it is a
PDF, that it is unsafe?
No, because PyPDF2 does not contain any security scanning functionality. Any content which is harmful to your system may, or may not, pass through PyPDF and continue to be of danger to your system depending on what other precautions you take.
As jpmc26 said PyPDF is simply a parser/generator, so it is highly unlikely that the contents of a PDF could pose a security thread to PyPDF itself.
If you're concerned about validity of pdfs, if you try to manipulate a pdf with PyPDF2 that's not a valid pdf then it will likely return an error. As for checking the contents of the pdf, the library itself doesn't do that, but you can write methods for checking the contents for certain patterns, analyze the stream, and find other ways to check it yourself. The best way to start with that would be to create an invalid pdf yourself and find what things you would want to look for. It also has some password validation, though I've honestly not dealt with that part of the library. PyPDF2 is a pretty powerful tool if you can learn how to use it effectively!
PyPDF2 doesn't execute parts of the PDF. It just parses it.
Bad things that can happen:
Infinite loops
Slow parsing e.g. due to quadratic runtime
We work hard on fixing those issues whenever we note them.
Another topic certainly is supply chain vulnerabilities. PyPDF2 is among the top 1% of packages on PyPI and thus the maintainers are required to use security keys. I review all PRs and I would not allow anything that allows code execution from the PDF itself / opens network connections / looks suspicious.
FYI: I'm the current maintainer of PyPDF2.
I'm writing a program that requires input in the form of a document, it needs to replace a few values, insert a table, and convert it to PDF. It's written in Python + Qt (PyQt). Is there any well known document standard which can be easily used programmatically? It must be cross platform, and preferably open.
I have looked into Microsoft Doc and Docx, which are binary formats and I can't edit them. Python has bindings for it, but they're only on Windows.
Open Office's ODT/ODF is zipped in an xml file, so I can edit that one but there's no command line utilities or any way to programmatically convert the file to a PDF. Open Office provides bindings, but you need to run Open Office from the command line, start a server, etc. And my clients may not have Open Office installed.
RTF is readable from Python, but I couldn't find any way/libraries to convert RTF documents to PDF.
At the moment I'm exporting from Microsoft Word to HTML, replacing the values and using PyQt to convert it to a PDF. However it loses formatting features and looks awful. I'm surprised there isn't a well known library which lets you edit a variety of document formats and convert them into other formats, am I missing something?
Update: Thanks for the advice, I'll have a look at using Latex.
Thanks,
Jackson
Have you looked into using LaTeX documents?
They are perfect to use programatically (compiling documents? You gotta love that...), and you have several Python frameworks you can use such as plasTeX and PyTex.
Exporting a LaTeX documents to PDF is almost immediate.
Since you're already using PyQt anyway, it might be worth looking at Qt's built-in RTF processing module which looks decent. Here's the documentation on detailed content manipulation including inserting tables. Also the QPrinter module's default print-to-file format happens to be PDF.
Without knowing more about your particular needs it's hard to say if these would do what you want, but since your application already has PyQt as a dependency, seems silly to introduce any more without evaluating the functionality you've already got available.
The non-GUI parts of the Qt framework are often overlooked though.
edit: included more links.
You might want to try ReportLab. The open source version can write PDFs, and the commercial version has a lot of really nice abstractions to allow output to a variety of different formats from a single input.
I don't know the kind of odience of your program, Tex is good and i would go with it.
Another possible choice is Excel format, parsing it with xlrd.
I've used it a couple of time and it's pretty straightforward.
Excel file is a good for the following reasons:
Well known format easy to edit
You could prepare a predefined template with constrains and table
Creating XML documents, transforming them to XSL/fo and rendering with Fop or RenderX. If you use docbook as the primary input, there are toolchains freely available for converting that to PDF, RTF, HTML and so forth.
It is rather quirky to use and not my idea of fun, but is does deliver and can be embedded in an application, AFAICT.
Creating docbook is very straightforward as it has a wide range of semantic tags, table support etc to give a "meaningful" markup which can be reliably formatted. The XSL stylesheets are modular and allow parts to be customized or replaced to generate your own look and feel.
It works well for relatively free flow documents with lots of text.
For filling in the blanks kind of documents, a regular reporting engine may be a better fit, or some straighforward XSL stylesheets spitting out the XSL-fo directly.