Best way to extract text from a Word doc without using COM/automation?

I use catdoc or antiword for this, whatever gives the result that is the easiest to parse. I have embedded this in python functions, so it is easy to use from the parsing system (which is written in python).

import os

def doc_to_text_catdoc(filename):
    (fi, fo, fe) = os.popen3('catdoc -w "%s"' % filename)
    fi.close()
    retval = fo.read()
    erroroutput = fe.read()
    fo.close()
    fe.close()
    if not erroroutput:
        return retval
    else:
        raise OSError("Executing the command caused an error: %s" % erroroutput)

# similar doc_to_text_antiword()

The -w switch to catdoc turns off line wrapping, BTW.

(Same answer as extracting text from MS word files in python)

Use the native Python docx module which I made this week. Here's how to extract all the text from a doc:

document = opendocx('Hello world.docx')

# This location is where most document content lives 
docbody = document.xpath('/w:document/w:body', namespaces=wordnamespaces)[0]

# Extract all text
print getdocumenttext(document)

See Python DocX site

100% Python, no COM, no .net, no Java, no parsing serialized XML with regexs.