Is there a Python module for converting RTF to plain text?

There is good library pyrtf-ng for all-purpose RTF handling.

Have you checked out pyrtf-ng?

Update: The parsing functionality is available if you do a Subversion checkout, but I’m not sure how full-featured it is. (Look in the rtfng.parser.base module.)

I ran into the same thing ans I was trying to code it myself. It’s not that easy but here is what I had when I decided to go for a commandline app. Its ruby but you can adapt to python very easily.
There is some header garbage to clean up, but you can see more or less the idea.

f = File.open('r.rtf','r')
 b=0
 p=false
 str = ''
 begin
    while (char = f.readchar)
        if char.chr=='{'
   b+=1 
   next
  end
        if char.chr=='}'
   b-=1 
   next
  end
  if char.chr=='\'
   p=true
   next
  end
  if p==true && (char.chr==' ' or char.chr=='n' or char.chr=='t' or char.chr=='r')
   p=false 
   next
  end
  if p==true && (char.chr==''')
#this is the source of my headaches. you need to read the code page from the header and encode this.
   p=false 
   str << '#'
   next
  end
  next if b>2
  next if p
  str << char.chr
    end
rescue EOFError
end
f.close

I’ve been working on a library called Pyth, which can do this:

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyth/

Converting an RTF file to plaintext looks something like this:

from pyth.plugins.rtf15.reader import Rtf15Reader
from pyth.plugins.plaintext.writer import PlaintextWriter

doc = Rtf15Reader.read(open('sample.rtf'))

print PlaintextWriter.write(doc).getvalue()

Pyth can also generate RTF files, read and write XHTML, generate documents from Python markup a la Nevow’s stan, and has limited experimental support for latex and pdf output. Its RTF support is pretty robust — we use it in production to read RTF files generated by various versions of Word, OpenOffice, Mac TextEdit, EIOffice, and others.

Conversely, if you want to write RTFs easily from Python, you can use the third-party module rtflib. It’s a fairly new and incomplete module but still very powerful and useful. Below is an example that writes “hello world” in rich text to an RTF called helloworld.rtf. This is a very primitive example, and the module can also be used to add colors, italics, tables, and many other aspects of rich text to RTF files.

from rtflib import *
file = RTF("helloworld.rtf")
file.startfile()
file.addstrict()
file.addtext("hello world")
file.writeout()

PyRTF-ng 0.9.1 has not parsed any of my RTF documents, both with the ParsingException.
First document was generated with OpenOffice 3.4, the second one with Mac TextEdit.

Pyth 0.5.6 parsed without problems both documents, but has not processed cyrillic symbols properly.

But each editor opens other’s editor document correctly and without trouble, so all libraries seems to have a weak rtf support.

So I’m writing my own parser with with blackjack and hookers.

(I’ve uploaded both files, so you can check RTF libraries by yourself: http://yadi.sk/d/RMHawVdSD8O9 http://yadi.sk/d/RmUaSe5tD8OD)

I just came across pyrtflib – there’s not much (any) documentation on it, it’s kinda a case of installing it and then using the inbuilt help() function to find out what’s available and what everything does.

Having said that in my little trial run of its rtf.Rtf2Html.getHtml() function it went well enough. I haven’t tried the Rtf2Txt function but given the simpler nature of converting rtf to plaintext it should do fine I’d expect.

Here’s a link to a script that converts rtf to text using regex:
Regular Expression for extracting text from an RTF string

Also, and updated link on github:
Github link

If you are on Mac , you can convert an RTF file file.rtf to TXT from the CLI like:

textutil -convert txt file.rtf