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    <p>The problem is that you have a Word .doc file, not a text file.</p> <p>A Word file is essentially a sequence of runs of formatted text. (It's actually more complicated than that, it's a tree of all kinds of things, some of which are runs of text, but let's keep it simple for now.)</p> <p>In "classic" Word format, each of these runs is a string of bytes. In modern (DOCX, aka Office 2007, aka Office Open XML, aka WordML) Word format, each of them is an XML node in a tree. But either way, if you have one run that ends with <code>:</code> and another that starts with <code>1</code>, you won't found <code>:1</code> in the file; you'll find <code>:</code> followed by a bunch of cruft (the end of one binary object and the start of the next, or the end of one XML node and the start of the next, possibly with other objects/nodes in between), followed by the <code>1</code>.</p> <p>There's no good way to deal with this without actually parsing the Word format.</p> <p>So, the big question is, which format do you have? </p> <hr> <p>If it's DOCX, that's basically just an XML file, or a ZIP file with XML files inside of it, which you can parse natively in Python—or, better, use a module like <a href="https://pypi.python.org/pypi/docx/0.2.1" rel="nofollow"><code>docx</code></a> that does all the hard work for you.</p> <p>If it's classic DOC, the only way to parse it is to read the reverse-engineered documentation that people have written up over the years and write some nasty code to deal with it. Or, of course, you can use some code that someone's already written. In this case, I don't know of any python modules that will help, but you can control the <a href="http://www.winfield.demon.nl" rel="nofollow"><code>antiword</code></a> program pretty easily via <code>subprocess</code>.</p> <hr> <p>Or, alternatively, if you have a program that can read the files on your machine, like Word or Wordpad/Write on Windows, or iWork Pages on Mac, or OpenOffice.org/Libre Office on any platform, you can script that. Python has nice wrappers to talk to COM interfaces on Windows and AppleScript interfaces on Mac, and OO.o/Libre is built to be scriptable.</p> <p><a href="http://www.galalaly.me/index.php/2011/09/use-python-to-parse-microsoft-word-documents-using-pywin32-library/" rel="nofollow">This blog post</a> is a nice example of using Word on Windows via <code>pywin32</code> to do things to doc files. You can use this as a starting point for your own code to extract the text from each file, or to make Word to the searching for you, or to just save a plain text copy of each file which you can then do whatever you want with. There are hundreds of other such examples all over the web, as well as similar examples for using <code>appscript</code> or <code>ScriptingBridge</code> to do the equivalent on the Mac, or using VBA instead of Python to script from inside Word, etc. To find out what functions are available when scripting Word, see the <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ee861527.aspx" rel="nofollow">Word 2013 developer reference</a>, or the similar docs for earlier versions if you don't have 2013, or just "Open Dictionary" in AppleScript Editor and look at Word's dictionary if you have a Mac.</p>
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    1. PO(python) Some trouble with RE's and .txt formatting
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    1. COAh. This is a very comprehensive answer. Thank you. My files are all .doc. I am using the newest version of Word so it is possible to save them as .docx, not sure why I wasn't doing that from the beginning. Anyway, I will see if there is an easy way to change all of the extensions to docx. Would parsing the files as .txt work properly with .docx? Or do I basically need to start over regardless? I encountered the docx module early on but struggled with it because there was not much documentation.
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    2. CO@griffsterb: No, you can't parse .docx files as .doc; you have the same problem, except that the runs of text are inside XML nodes instead of binary objects. The only advantage is that XML is easy to parse in Python (and there are modules that already do that specifically for docx), while undocumented binary formats that are only incompletely reverse-engineered are not. (Also I don't _think_ you're confused about this bit, but just to make sure: just changing the extensions doesn't affect the contents of the files. What matters is what format the file is in, not what the name is.)
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    3. CO@griffsterb: Meanwhile, if you can get Word to save the files as DOCX files, why can't you get Word to save them as plain text files? Then your life would be easy.
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