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Read all types of files in python

I am trying to extract information from different types of files in python(.pdf .doc .docx) and convert to .txt but while processing different files I am getting space and newlines when not required and many other issues. I have tried PyPDF2 and PDF manager.Please suggest me something with which i can extract information from files.
EDIT
Currently looking for something which can help me extract exact text from .pdf files. I have tried PyPDF, PDFMiner and PDF Manager and I am getting issues with some pdfs in all of them.

Personally I think pdfminer is the best python module for extracting information from pdfs Get it here
I think you can refer to this link
for corresponding file formats.

How to convert XML Word Documents to DOCX?

I have been given a series of folders with large amounts of Word documents in .xml formatting. They each contain some VBA code, but the code on all of them has already been run, so I don't need to keep this.
I need to print all of the files in each folder, but due to constraints on XML files on the network, I can't simply mass-print them from Windows Explorer, so I need to convert them to .docx (or .doc) first.
How can I go about doing this? I tried a simple python script using python-docx:
import os
from docx import Document
folderPath=<folderpath>
fileNamesList=os.listdir(folderPath)
for xmlFileName in fileNamesList:
currentDoc=Document(os.path.join(folderPath,xmlFileName))
docxFileName=xmlFileName.replace('.xml','.docx')
currentDoc.save(os.path.join(folderPath,docxFileName))
currentDoc.close()
This gives:
docx.opc.exceptions.PackageNotFoundError: Package not found at <first file name>.xml
I'm guessing this is because python-docx isn't meant to open .xml files, but that's a pretty uneducated guess. Searching around for this error, all I can find are problems with it not being installed properly (which it is, as far as I can tell) or using .doc files instead of .docx.
Am I simply using python-docx incorrectly? If not, is there are more suitable package or technique I should be using?

It's not clear just what sort of files those .xml files are, but I suspect they are a transitional format used I think in Word 2003, which was XML-based, but not the Open Packaging Convention (OPC) format used in Word documents since Word 2007.
python-docx is not going to read those, now or ever, so you'll either need to convert them to .docx format or parse the XML directly.
If I had Windows available, I suppose I would use VBA to write a short conversion script and then work with the .docx files using python-pptx. I would start by seeing if Word could load the .xml file and go from there.
You might be able to find a utility to do a bulk conversion, but I didn't find any on a quick search.
If all you're interested in is a one-time print, and Word will load the files, then a VBA script for that without the conversion step might be a good option. python-docx doesn't print .docx files, only read and write them.

XLSX to XML with schema map

I have built a couple basic workflows using XML tools on top of XLSX workbooks that are mapped to an XML schema. You would enter data into the spreadsheet, export the XML and I had some scripts that would then work with the data.
Now I'm trying to eliminate that step and build a more integrated and portable tool that others could use easily by moving from XSLT/XQuery to Python. I would still like to use Excel for the data entry, but have the Python script read the XLSX file directly.
I found a bunch of easy to use libraries to read from Excel but they need to explicitly state what cells the data is in, like range('A1:C2') etc. The useful thing about using the XML maps was that users could resize or even move tables to fit different rows and rename sheets. Is their a library that would let me select tables as units?
Another approach I tried was to just uncompress the XLSX and just parse the XML directly. The problem with that is that our data is quite complex (taking up to 30-50 sheets) and parsing that in the uncompressed XLSX structure is really daunting. I did find my XML schema within the uncompressed XLSX, so is there any way to reformat the data into this schema outside of Excel? (basically what Excel does when I save a workbook as an .xml file)

The Excel format is pretty complicated with dependencies between components – you can't for example be sure of that the order of the worksheets in the folder worksheets has any bearing to what the file looks like in Excel.
I don't really understand exactly what you're trying to do but the existing libraries present an interface for client code that hides the XML layer. If you don't want that you'll have to root around for the parts that you find useful. In openpyxl you want to look at the stuff in openpyxl/reader specifically worksheet.py.
However, you might have better luck using lxml as this (using libxml2 in the background) will allow you load a single XML into Python and manipulate it directly using the .objectify() method. We don't do this in openpyxl because XML trees consume a lot of memory (and many people have very large worksheets) but the library for working with Powerpoint shows just how easy this can be.

How can I extract the tables, text and the pictures in ODT(OpenDocumentText) format using Python?

How can I extract the tables, text and the pictures in an ODT(OpenDocumentText) file to output them to another ODT file using Python on Ubuntu?

OOoPy seems to be a good fit. I've never used it, but it comes with documentation and code examples, and it can read and write ODT files.

An easy way is to just rename the foo.odt to foo.zip and then extract it. the extracted directory contains many files including Pictures.
However I think it's better to change it's type to docx and then do the process on docx (extract it). Because it extract images with better name (image1, image2, ...).

create office files from python

We have a project in python with django.
We need to generate complex word, excel and pdf files.
For the rest of our projects which were done in PHP we used PHPexcel ,
PHPWord and tcpdf for PDF.
What libraries for python would you recommend for creating this kind of files ? (for excel and word its imortant to use the open xml file format xlsx , docx)

Python-docx may help ( https://github.com/mikemaccana/python-docx ).
Python doesn't have highly-developed tools to manipulate word documents. I've found the java library xdocreport ( https://code.google.com/p/xdocreport/ ) to be the best by far for Word reporting. Because I need to generate PCL, which is efficiently done via FOP I also use docx4j.
To integrate this with my python, I use the spark framework to wrap it up with a simple web service, and use requests on the python side to talk to the service.

For excel, there's openpyxl, which actually is a python port of PHPexcel, afaik. I haven't used it yet, but it sounds ok to me.

I would recommend using Docutils. It takes reStructuredText files and converts them to a range of output files. Included in the package are HTML, LaTeX and .odf file writers but in the sandbox there are a whole load of other writers for writing to other formats, see for example, the WordML writer (disclaimer: I haven't used it).
The advantage of this solution is that you can write plain text (reStructuredText) master files, which are human readable as is, and then convert to a range of other file formats as required.
Whilst not a Python solution, you should also look at Pandoc a Haskell library which supports a much wider range of output and input formats than docutils. One major advantage of Pandoc over Docutils is that you can do the reverse translation, i.e. WordML to reStructuredText. You can try Pandoc here.

I have never used any libraries for this, but you can change the extension of any docx, xlsx file to zip, and see the magic!
Generating openxml files is as simple as generating couple of XML files (you can use templates) and zipping it.

Simplest way to generate PDF is to generate HTML (with CSS+images) and convert it using wkhtmltopdf tool.