In certain cases, you need to split the large Word documents by breaking them down into smaller ones. You can split a Word document by pages, sections, or columns. In this article, you will learn how to split a Word document into multiple files using Python. The step-by-step guide and code samples will demonstrate how to split a Word document by sections, pages, or page ranges programmatically.
- Python Library to Split MS Word Documents
- Split a Word Document by Sections
- Splitting a Word Document by Pages
- Split a Word Document by a Page Range
Python Library to Split MS Word Documents
To split a DOCX or DOC document into multiple files, we will use Aspose.Words for Python. It is a word processing library to create and manipulate Word documents. You can install it in your Python applications from PyPI using the following pip command.
pip install aspose-words
Split a Word Document by Sections in Python
In most cases, the Word document is divided into multiple sections using section breaks. To save each section into a separate file, you can split the document by sections. The following steps demonstrate how to split a Word document by sections in Python.
- Load the Word document using Document class.
- Loop thourght each section in Document.sections collection.
- For each section in the collection, perform the following steps:
- Create a new object of Document class.
- Clear the default sections using Document.sections.clear() method.
- Import section into new document using Document.import_node(Section, True).as_section() method and get the returned Section in an object.
- Add returned Section to the sections collection of new document.
- Save the new document as a DOCX file using Document.save(string) method.
The following code sample shows how to split a Word document by sections in Python.
Splitting a Word Document by Pages in Python
Now, let’s have a look at how to split each page of the document and save it as a separate DOCX file. The following are the steps to split a Word document by pages.
- Load the Word document using Document class.
- Get the page count in the document using Document.page_count property.
- Loop through the page count and in each iteration, perform the following steps:
- Extract the page into an object using Document.extract_pages(pageIndex, 1) method.
- Save the extracted page as a DOCX file using Document.save(string) method.
The following code sample shows how to split a Word document by pages.
Split a Word Document by a Page Range in Python
You can also split a range of pages in a Word document and save it as a separate file. The following are the steps to achieve this in Python.
- Load the Word document using Document class.
- Extract the pages using Document.extract_pages(int, int) method where first parameter is the starting page’s index and the second is number of pages.
- Save the extracted page range as a DOCX file using Document.save(string) method.
The following code sample shows how to extract a range of pages from a Word document and save it as a DOCX file.
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Conclusion
In this article, you have learned how to split a Word document into multiple documents in Python. The code samples have demonstrated how to split a Word document by sections, pages, or a page range. Aspose.Words for Python also provides a number of exciting features that you can explore using the documentation. Also, you can post your questions to our forum.
