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docx Mail Merge

Performs a Mail Merge on Office Open XML (docx) files. Can be used on any system without having to install Microsoft Office Word. Supports Python 2.7, 3.3 and up.

Project Status

I wrote the library some years ago to scratch an itch I was having. The itch is long gone and therefore the need to keep this library maintained. Over years I’ve merged some PRs, but my interest in maintaining this library has faded. I have decided to archive this repository. There is a community effort to continue work on this codebase, which can be found here: https://pypi.org/project/docx-mailmerge2/.

Installation

Installation with pip:

$ pip install docx-mailmerge

Usage

Open the file.

from mailmerge import MailMerge
with MailMerge('input.docx') as document:
    ...

List all merge fields.

print document.get_merge_fields()

Merge fields, supplied as kwargs.

document.merge(field1='docx Mail Merge',
               field2='Can be used for merging docx documents')

Merge table rows. In your template, add a MergeField to the row you would like to designate as template. Supply the name of this MergeField as anchor parameter. The second parameter contains the rows with key-value pairs for the MergeField replacements.

document.merge_rows('col1',
                    [{'col1': 'Row 1, Column 1', 'col2': 'Row 1 Column 1'},
                     {'col1': 'Row 2, Column 1', 'col2': 'Row 2 Column 1'},
                     {'col1': 'Row 3, Column 1', 'col2': 'Row 3 Column 1'}])

Starting in version 0.2.0 you can also combine these two separate calls into a single call to merge.

document.merge(field1='docx Mail Merge',
               col1=[
                   {'col1': 'A'},
                   {'col1': 'B'},
               ])

Starting in version 0.2.0 there's also the feature for template merging. This creates a copy of the template for each item in the list, does a merge, and separates them by page or section breaks (see function documentation).

When using this feature, make sure you don't use comments, footnotes, bookmarks, etc. This is because these elements have an id attribute, which must be unique. This library does not handle this, resulting in invalid documents.

document.merge_templates([
    {'field1': "Foo", 'field2: "Copy #1"},
    {'field1': "Bar", 'field2: "Copy #2"},
], separator='page_break')

Write document to file. This should be a new file, as ZipFile cannot modify existing zip files.

document.write('output.docx')

See also the unit tests and this nice write-up Populating MS Word Templates with Python on Practical Business Python for more information and examples.

Todo / Wish List

  • Image merging.

Contributing

  • Fork the repository on GitHub and start hacking
  • Create / fix the unit tests
  • Send a pull request with your changes

Unit tests

In order to make sure that the library performs the way it was designed, unit tests are used. When providing new features, or fixing bugs, there should be a unit test that demonstrates it. Run the test suite:

python -m unittest discover

Credits

This library was written by Bouke Haarsma and contributors.