docx-lite

A lightweight, fast DOCX text extraction library for Rust with minimal dependencies.

Features

• 🚀 Fast - Optimized for speed with streaming XML parsing
• 🪶 Lightweight - Minimal dependencies (only zip, quick-xml, and thiserror)
• 🛡️ Safe - Zero unsafe code
• 📊 Tables - Full support for table text extraction
• 🎯 Simple API - Easy to use with both simple and advanced APIs
• 🔧 Robust - Handles malformed documents gracefully

Installation

Add this to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
docx-lite = "0.2.0"

Quick Start

use docx_lite::extract_text;

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    let text = extract_text("document.docx")?;
    println!("{}", text);
    Ok(())
}

Advanced Usage

use docx_lite::{parse_document_from_path, ExtractOptions};

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    let doc = parse_document_from_path("document.docx")?;

    // Extract text with all options enabled
    let options = ExtractOptions::all();
    let text = doc.extract_text_with_options(&options);
    println!("{}", text);

    // Or customize extraction
    let custom_options = ExtractOptions {
        include_headers: true,
        include_footers: true,
        include_footnotes: false,
        include_endnotes: false,
        include_list_markers: true,
    };
    let custom_text = doc.extract_text_with_options(&custom_options);

    // Access specific elements
    for list_item in &doc.lists {
        println!("List item (level {}): {}", list_item.level, list_item.text);
    }

    for footnote in &doc.footnotes {
        println!("Footnote {}: {}",
            footnote.id,
            footnote.paragraphs[0].to_text()
        );
    }

    Ok(())
}

API

Simple API

• extract_text(path) - Extract all text from a DOCX file
• extract_text_from_bytes(bytes) - Extract text from DOCX bytes
• extract_text_from_reader(reader) - Extract text from any reader

Advanced API

• parse_document(reader) - Parse DOCX into a structured Document
• parse_document_from_path(path) - Parse DOCX file into a structured Document

Supported Elements

• ✅ Paragraphs
• ✅ Runs (with bold, italic, underline formatting)
• ✅ Tables (with rows and cells)
• ✅ Lists (bullets and numbering) - NEW in v0.2.0
• ✅ Headers/Footers - NEW in v0.2.0
• ✅ Footnotes/Endnotes - NEW in v0.2.0
• ✅ Advanced text extraction with options

Performance

docx-lite is designed for speed and efficiency:

• Streaming XML parsing (no full DOM loading)
• Minimal memory allocation
• Zero-copy where possible
• Optimized for text extraction use case

Why docx-lite?

Unlike other DOCX libraries in the Rust ecosystem, docx-lite:

1. Compiles on modern Rust - No issues with latest Rust versions
2. Minimal dependencies - Reduces compilation time and security surface
3. Production-ready - Used in production at V-Lawyer
4. Focused scope - Does one thing well: text extraction

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

License

This project is dual-licensed under MIT OR Apache-2.0.

Credits

Developed by the V-Lawyer team as part of our commitment to open source.