Add header in *.docx word file using python

Question

I have a question: How do add header (and footer) in *.docx file? I use library python-docx in my django project. But it really can't add header. I found solution on stack (July 2012) with using 'win32com', but nowadays it don't work for me. Help me advice. Thank you. Have a nice day.

Answer 1

Courtest of edi9999 I think the best way you can take is looking at python-docx to see how it manages the files. Docx is a zipped format (Docx Tag Wiki):

The .docx format is a zipped file that contains the following folders:

+--docProps
|  +  app.xml
|  \  core.xml
+  res.log
+--word //this folder contains most of the files that control the content of the document
|  +  document.xml //Is the actual content of the document
|  +  endnotes.xml
|  +  fontTable.xml
|  +  footer1.xml //Containst the elements in the footer of the document
|  +  footnotes.xml
|  +--media //This folder contains all images embedded in the word
|  |  \  image1.jpeg
|  +  settings.xml
|  +  styles.xml
|  +  stylesWithEffects.xml
|  +--theme
|  |  \  theme1.xml
|  +  webSettings.xml
|  \--_rels
|     \  document.xml.rels //this document tells word where the images are situated
+  [Content_Types].xml
\--_rels
   \  .rels

A library like docx-python extracts at first the docx, so you could find it in the python docx: I have found it for you: https://github.com/mikemaccana/python-docx/blob/master/docx.py#L65

def opendocx(file):
    '''Open a docx file, return a document XML tree'''
    mydoc = zipfile.ZipFile(file)
    xmlcontent = mydoc.read('word/document.xml')
    document = etree.fromstring(xmlcontent)
    return document

You can get the xmlcontent of 'word/document.xml' which is the main content of the docx, change it either using docx-python (which I recommend to you, docx-python seems to be able to add many different elements. If you want to copy the content of an other word document at the beginning of the document, you could probably try to copy the content of the document.xml to your document.xml, but It will probably give you some errors, specially if you use Images or non-text content.

To add a header or a footer, you will have to create a file word/header1.xml or a word/footer1.xml You could just copy the header1.xml content of a file you created, this should work.

Hope this helps