Feature: Find / replace text and generally *modify* docx files

I’m doing a lot of work with existing docx (creating many docx from a template). I hacked this together but there are better ways I think, any plans to natively increase support in modifying docx? XPATH? This is my main use case.

def replace(document, search, replace):
    """Walk the tree down to w:t xml and update text node"""
    searchre = re.compile(search)
    count = 0

    # Loop over all paras in doc
    for para in document.paragraphs:
        # Loop over all runs in para
        for run in para.runs:
            if len(run._r.t_lst) > 1:
                raise
            if len(run._r.t_lst) == 1:
                element_wt = run._r.t_lst[0]
                this_text = element_wt.text
                if searchre.search(this_text):
                    newtext = re.sub(search, replace, this_text)
                    count += 1
                    element_wt.text = newtext
            else:
                continue

    logging.debug("Replaced {} with {} {} times".format(search, replace, count))

[Animal-Machine]

For those still looking for a solution, here is the python module you’re looking for: https://github.com/elapouya/python-docx-template

[scanny]

If you want to pursue, then look in the .rels file/part for the document and see which relationship points to footer2.xml. Then find the rId of that relationship and find it in the XML for the document. Is it possible there is more than one section in the document and you’re inspecting the wrong one?