Python docx - AttributeError: 'bytes' object has no attribute 'seek'

Question

What I have as input: docx document raw bytes in byte64 format.
What I am trying to achieve: extract text from this document for further processing.
I tried to follow this answer: extracting text from MS word files in python

My code fragment:

base64_bytes = input.encode('utf-8')
decoded_data = base64.decodebytes(base64_bytes)
document = Document(decoded_data)
docText = '\n\n'.join([paragraph.text.encode('utf-8') for paragraph in document.paragraphs])

The document = Document(decoded_data) line gives me the following error: AttributeError: 'bytes' object has no attribute 'seek'
The decoded_data is in the following format: b'PK\\x03\\x04\\x14\\x00\\x08\\x08\\x08\\x00\\x87@CP\\x00...

How should I format the raw data to extract text from docx?

Answer 1

From the official documentation, emphasis mine:

docx.Document(docx=None)

Return a Document object loaded from docx, where docx can be either a path to a .docx file (a string) or a file-like object. If docx is missing or None, the built-in default document “template” is loaded.

So if you provide a string or string-like parameter it is interpreted as the path to a docx file. To provide the contents from memory, you need to pass in a file-like object aka a BytesIO instance (the entire point of StringIO and BytesIO being to "convert" strings and bytes to file-like objects):

document = Document(io.BytesIO(decoded_data))

side-note: you probably want to remove the .encode call in the list comprehension, in Python 3 text (str) and bytes (bytes) are not compatible at all, so the line is going to blow up when you try to concatenate bytes (encoded text) with textual separators.