extracting text from MS word files in python

Use the native Python docx module. Here's how to extract all the text from a doc:

document = docx.Document(filename)
docText = '\n\n'.join(
    paragraph.text for paragraph in document.paragraphs
)
print(docText)

See Python DocX site

Also check out Textract which pulls out tables etc.

Parsing XML with regexs invokes cthulu. Don't do it!

benjamin's answer is a pretty good one. I have just consolidated...

import zipfile, re

docx = zipfile.ZipFile('/path/to/file/mydocument.docx')
content = docx.read('word/document.xml').decode('utf-8')
cleaned = re.sub('<(.|\n)*?>','',content)
print(cleaned)

You could make a subprocess call to antiword. Antiword is a linux commandline utility for dumping text out of a word doc. Works pretty well for simple documents (obviously it loses formatting). It's available through apt, and probably as RPM, or you could compile it yourself.