CL-DOCX

Introduction

CL-DOCX is a simple library for reading and manipulating data inside Docx files.

The example way of using the library is as such:

(with-open-docx (doc "./test.docx")
  (setf paras (get-all-texts doc))
    (write-value (aref paras 0) "hi"))

The primary way to engage with this library is the macro with-open-docx , The doc variable will contain the xml tree node of the document.xml file in the lisp structure format.

To extract all paragraphs from a document.xml file, the function get-all-paragraphs is used. This function returns a VECTOR of PARAGRAPH objects. On these objects, you can use the Generic Functions read-value to read the value of each paragraph (string) and write-value which gets an PARAGRAPH object, a replacement string and modifies it. The function get-all-texts gets every TEXT item inside the word file similarly.

After the end of with-open-docx , all changes to the contents are saved to the docx file.

Here's another example of reading all paragraph from a docx file:

(map 'vector #'read-value (get-all-texts doc))

You can also get all the tables from a docx file in the same manner. Tables are organzied in this manner:

1: A table object contains list of row object

2: A row object contains a list of cell objects

The function get-all-tables returns a list of available tables inside the docx files. You can extract rows from a table and cells from a row object with functions get-rows and get-cells. You can use the generic function read-values to get all entries of a table as a list of lists like (This is a 3X3 table containing only two entries):

(("table2" "table2" NIL) (NIL NIL NIL) (NIL NIL NIL))

To edit the value of an existing cell, we can use the same write-value method. Here's an example of changing the value of one cell to a new value:

(with-open-docx (doc #P"./test.docx")
  (let* ((tables (get-all-tables doc)) ;;LIST of tables in docx
         (first-row (car (get-rows (car tables)))) ;; A LIST of CELL Objects
         (first-cell (car (get-cells first-row))))
    (write-value first-cell "NEWCELL")))

You can also remove a row from a table using the method remove-item

Features Implemented

• Reading texts from a docx file

• Editing the texts from a docx file by writing on the text objects

• Writing Lisp data inside a docx file

• Tables operations:

  • Reading Tables/Rows/Cells
  • Editing Tables/Rows/Cells
  • Adding Tables/Rows/Cells
  • Removing Tables/Rows/Cells

How to Install

1: Clone the repository to your quicklisp's local-project folder

2: Use this to load the contents:

(ql:quickload "cl-docx")