Getting the List Numbers of List Items in docx file using Python-Docx

According to [ReadThedocs.Python-DocX]: Style-related objects – _NumberingStyle objects, this functionality is not implemented yet.
The alternative (at least one of them) [PyPI]: docx2python is kind of poor handling these elements (mainly because it returns everything converted to strings).

So, a solution would be to parse the XML files manually – discovered how empirically, working on this very example. A good documentation place is Office Open XML (I don’t know whether it’s a standard followed by all the tools that deal with .docx files (especially MS Word)):

• Get each paragraph (w:p node) from word/document.xml

  • Check whether it’s a numbered item (it has w:pPr -> w:numPr) subnode

  • Get the number style Id and level: w:val attribute of w:numId and w:ilvl subnodes (of the node from previous bullet)

  • Match the 2 values with (in word/numbering.xml):

    • w:abstractNumId attribute of w:abstractNum node
    • w:ilvl attribute of w:lvl subnode

    and get the w:val attribute of the corresponding w:numFmt and w:lvlText subnodes (note that bullets are included as well, they can be discriminated based on the bullet value for aforementioned w:numFmt‘s attribute)

However that seems extremely complex, so I’m proposing a workaround (gainarie) that makes use of docx2pythons partial support.

Test document (sample.docx – created with LibreOffice):

code00.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys
import docx
from docx2python import docx2python as dx2py


def ns_tag_name(node, name):
    if node.nsmap and node.prefix:
        return "{{{:s}}}{:s}".format(node.nsmap[node.prefix], name)
    return name


def descendants(node, desc_strs):
    if node is None:
        return []
    if not desc_strs:
        return [node]
    ret = {}
    for child_str in desc_strs[0]:
        for child in node.iterchildren(ns_tag_name(node, child_str)):
            descs = descendants(child, desc_strs[1:])
            if not descs:
                continue
            cd = ret.setdefault(child_str, [])
            if isinstance(descs, list):
                cd.extend(descs)
            else:
                cd.append(descs)
    return ret


def simplified_descendants(desc_dict):
    ret = []
    for vs in desc_dict.values():
        for v in vs:
            if isinstance(v, dict):
                ret.extend(simplified_descendants(v))
            else:
                ret.append(v)
    return ret


def process_list_data(attrs, dx2py_elem):
    #print(simplified_descendants(attrs))
    desc = simplified_descendants(attrs)[0]
    level = int(desc.attrib[ns_tag_name(desc, "val")])
    elem = [i for i in dx2py_elem[0].split("t") if i][0]#.rstrip(")")
    return "    " * level + elem + " "


def main(*argv):
    fname = r"./sample.docx"
    docd = docx.Document(fname)
    docdpy = dx2py(fname)
    dr = docdpy.docx_reader
    #print(dr.files)  # !!! Check word/numbering.xml !!!
    docdpy_runs = docdpy.document_runs[0][0][0]
    if len(docd.paragraphs) != len(docdpy_runs):
        print("Lengths don't match. Abort")
        return -1
    subnode_tags = (("pPr",), ("numPr",), ("ilvl",))  # (("pPr",), ("numPr",), ("ilvl", "numId"))  # numId is for matching elements from word/numbering.xml
    for idx, (par, l) in enumerate(zip(docd.paragraphs, docdpy_runs)):
        #print(par.text, l)
        numbered_attrs = descendants(par._element, subnode_tags)
        #print(numbered_attrs)
        if numbered_attrs:
            print(process_list_data(numbered_attrs, l) + par.text)
        else:
            print(par.text)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    print("Python {:s} {:03d}bit on {:s}n".format(" ".join(elem.strip() for elem in sys.version.split("n")),
                                                   64 if sys.maxsize > 0x100000000 else 32, sys.platform))
    rc = main(*sys.argv[1:])
    print("nDone.")
    sys.exit(rc)

Output:

[cfati@CFATI-5510-0:e:WorkDevStackOverflowq066374154]> "e:WorkDevVEnvspy_pc064_03.09_test0Scriptspython.exe" code00.py
Python 3.9.9 (tags/v3.9.9:ccb0e6a, Nov 15 2021, 18:08:50) [MSC v.1929 64 bit (AMD64)] 064bit on win32

Doc title
doc subtitle

heading1 text0

Paragr0 line0
Paragr0 line1
Paragr0 line2

space Paragr0 line3
a) aa (numbered)
heading1 text1
Paragrx line0
Paragrx line1
        a)      w tabs Paragrx line2 (NOT numbered – just to mimic 1ax below)

1) paragrx 1x (numbered)
    a) paragrx 1ax (numbered)
        I) paragrx 1aIx (numbered)
    b) paragrx 1bx (numbered)
2) paragrx 2x (numbered)
3) paragrx 3x (numbered)

-- paragrx bullet 0
    -- paragrx bullet 00

paragxx text

Done.

Notes:

• Only nodes from word/document.xml are processed (via paragraph’s _element (LXML node) attribute)
• Some list attributes are not captured (due to docx2python‘s limitations)
• This is far away from being robust
• descendants, simplified_descendants can be much simplified, but I wanted to keep the former as generic as possible (if functionality needs to be extended)