Remove dates from comments and tracked edits in docx. Also, a cheatsheet for namespaces in lxml.

remove_docx_dates.py

#!/usr/bin/env python3
"""Usage: {} AUTHOR_SUBSTRING INPUT.DOCX OUTPUT.DOCX

Remove date metadata from Word document for authors matching
AUTHOR_SUBSTRING. Handy if you don't want other people to know when
exactly you found time to work on their document ;)

In more detail: Read INPUT.DOCX, extract the comments and tracked edits,
manipulate them (cf. functions `modify_comments()` and
`modify_tracked_edits()` -- by default, they remove date metadata
when the author contains AUTHOR_SUBSTRING, but you can tweak them
depending on your needs), then create OUTPUT.DOCX with the modified
comments and tracked edits.

Note that OUTPUT.DOCX tends to be larger than the input file for some
reason. To get back to a reasonable size, just re-save OUTPUT.DOCX from
Word.

"""

import sys
import zipfile
from itertools import chain

from lxml import etree

W_NS = "http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main"
NSMAP = {"w": W_NS}
W = "{" + W_NS + "}"


def modify_comments(comments, author_substr):
    et = etree.fromstring(comments)
    comments = et.xpath("//w:comment", namespaces=NSMAP)
    for c in comments:
        if author_substr in c.attrib[W + "author"]:
            del c.attrib[W + "date"]
        # NOTE: basically do whatever you want here with the comment
        # based on its XML attributes and content
        # author = c.attrib[W + "author"]
        # date = c.attrib[W + "date"]
        # print(f"{author} commented on {date}:")
        # print(c.xpath("string(.)"))
        # NOTE: if you want to completely delete the comment, you can't
        # just do `et.remove(c)`, because there's also a comment marker
        # within the document itself, so that's more of a hassle
    return etree.tostring(et)


def modify_tracked_edits(document, author_substr):
    et = etree.fromstring(document)
    tracked_edits = chain(
        et.xpath("//w:ins", namespaces=NSMAP), et.xpath("//w:del", namespaces=NSMAP)
    )
    for te in tracked_edits:
        # NOTE: the guidelines are the same as in modify_comments above
        if author_substr in te.attrib[W + "author"]:
            del te.attrib[W + "date"]
    return etree.tostring(et)


def main():
    author_substr, in_fname, out_fname = sys.argv[1:]
    comments_path = "word/comments.xml"
    document_path = "word/document.xml"

    # read in existing comments
    with zipfile.ZipFile(in_fname) as docx_in:
        comments = docx_in.read(comments_path)
        document = docx_in.read(document_path)

    comments = modify_comments(comments, author_substr)
    document = modify_tracked_edits(document, author_substr)

    # recreate zip archive with new version of comments
    with zipfile.ZipFile(in_fname) as docx_in:
        with zipfile.ZipFile(out_fname, "w") as docx_out:
            # NOTE: this is some kind of ZIP file thing, NOT Word
            # comments...
            docx_out.comment = docx_in.comment
            for item in docx_in.infolist():
                # ... the old version of these gets ignored here...
                if item.filename not in (comments_path, document_path):
                    docx_out.writestr(item, docx_in.read(item))
            # ... and the updated versions get added here:
            docx_out.writestr(comments_path, comments)
            docx_out.writestr(document_path, document)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

hi, do you know some solution to add a new comment in the docx format file?