Extract text from Word DOCX files with unzip and sed, command-line utilities, when Python document libraries are unavailable. Read the document’s main text, remove XML tags, clean whitespace, and save the extracted content.
Extract text from DOCX files using shell commands when python-docx is unavailable
Review the instructions the agent will receive before you install.
When you need to read content from Microsoft Word (.docx) files but python-docx or similar libraries are unavailable, use this shell-based approach to extract text reliably.
python-docx or similar librariesDOCX files are ZIP archives containing XML files. Extract and parse the main document XML:
unzip -p filename.docx word/document.xml | sed -e 's/<[^>]*>//g'
ls -la document.docx
Use unzip -p to pipe the document.xml content directly to stdout:
unzip -p document.docx word/document.xml
Pipe through sed to remove all XML tags:
unzip -p document.docx word/document.xml | sed -e 's/<[^>]*>//g'
For cleaner output, remove excessive whitespace and newlines:
unzip -p document.docx word/document.xml | \
sed -e 's/<[^>]*>//g' | \
sed -e 's/^[[:space:]]*//' -e 's/[[:space:]]*$//' | \
sed -e '/^$/d'
unzip -p document.docx word/document.xml | \
sed -e 's/<[^>]*>//g' > output.txt
Add this reusable function to your scripts:
parse_docx() {
local file="$1"
if [ ! -f "$file" ]; then
echo "Error: File not found: $file" >&2
return 1
fi
unzip -p "$file" word/document.xml 2>/dev/null | \
sed -e 's/<[^>]*>//g' | \
sed -e 's/^[[:space:]]*//' -e 's/[[:space:]]*$//' | \
sed -e '/^$/d'
}
# Usage: parse_docx document.docx
Confirm extraction worked by checking output:
parse_docx document.docx | head -20
For more complex parsing needs:
tmpdir=$(mktemp -d)
unzip document.docx -d "$tmpdir"
cat "$tmpdir/word/document.xml" | sed -e 's/<[^>]*>//g'
rm -rf "$tmpdir"
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