Can I use Win32 COM to replace text inside a word document?

com, ms-word, python, replace, winapi

Solution

See if this gives you a start on word automation using python.

Once you open a document, you could do the following. After the following code, you can Close the document & open another.

Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
With Selection.Find
    .Text = "test"
    .Replacement.Text = "test2"
    .Forward = True
    .Wrap = wdFindContinue
    .Format = False
    .MatchCase = False
    .MatchWholeWord = False
    .MatchKashida = False
    .MatchDiacritics = False
    .MatchAlefHamza = False
    .MatchControl = False
    .MatchWildcards = False
    .MatchSoundsLike = False
    .MatchAllWordForms = False
End With
Selection.Find.Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll

The above code replaces the text "test" with "test2" and does a "replace all". You can turn other options true/false depending on what you need.

The simple way to learn this is to create a macro with actions you want to take, see the generated code & use it in your own example (with/without modified parameters).

EDIT: After looking at some code by Matthew, you could do the following

MSWord.Documents.Open(filename)
Selection = MSWord.Selection

And then translate the above VB code to Python. Note: The following VB code is shorthand way of assigning property without using the long syntax.

(VB)

With Selection.Find
    .Text = "test"
    .Replacement.Text = "test2"
End With

Python

find = Selection.Find
find.Text = "test"
find.Replacement.Text = "test2"

Pardon my python knowledge. But, I hope you get the idea to move forward. Remember to do a Save & Close on Document, after you are done with the find/replace operation.

In the end, you could call `MSWord.Quit` (to release Word object from memory).

Problem

I have to perform a large number of replacements in some documents, and the thing is, I would like to be able to automate that task. Some of the documents contain common strings, and this would be pretty useful if it could be automated. From what I read so far, COM could be one way of doing this, but I don't know if text replacement is supported. I'd like to be able to perform this task in python? Is it possible? Could you post a code snippet showing how to access the document's text? Thanks!

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