Open New Created File Problem (solved)

[dp-006]

I just wanted to share something interesting:

When you create a new Microsoft Word document (without opening or editing it), and try to load it using python-docx with the following code:

from docx import Document

f = open('New Microsoft Word Document.docx', 'rb')
document = Document(f)
f.close()

You’ll get this error:

<_io.BufferedReader name='New Microsoft Word Document.docx'>
Traceback (most recent call last):
  ...
zipfile.BadZipFile: File is not a zip file

This happens because a brand-new Word document that hasn't been opened or edited yet isn't actually a valid .docx file—it’s just a placeholder and not a proper ZIP archive (which .docx files are under the hood). So python-docx can’t read it and throws a BadZipFile error.

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Regards...

[scanny]

@dp-006 You can't create a DOCX file from scratch with python-docx. All you can do is open an existing DOCX and edit it.

When you say document = Document(), that's loading a "default-template.docx" file that's included with the package. Otherwise what you give to Document needs to be a valid path (or file-like object) that is already a DOCX file.

This code is how you do what I think you're trying to do in the code above:

document = Document()
document.save("New Microsoft Word Document.docx")