I want to pull the text content from a public Google Docs document and show it on my website. The document is shared publicly so anyone can view it. My team updates this document regularly and I want the website to display the current text automatically.
I tried looking at the Google Drive API but it seems like I can only get file info or download the whole file. I need just the plain text content without all the formatting stuff.
Has anyone done something like this before? I’m hoping there’s a simple way to do this without writing tons of code. If it’s too complicated I’ll just put a link to the document instead. Any ideas on how much coding this would take?
Skip the Drive API and go straight to Google Docs API instead - way easier for this. Use documents.get to pull structured content you can parse directly. I built this for our company blog and it’s way more reliable than exporting files. The response gives you all text elements in a clean, predictable format so you grab exactly what you want. Only tricky part is the nested response structure, but write a simple recursive function to walk through the content elements and you’re golden. Same auth as Drive API but you get much better control over what you extract. Same coding effort but tons more flexibility if you want to keep formatting like headers or links later.
Built this exact feature for a client last year. Google Drive API v3 handles it - just use the export endpoint with MIME type ‘text/plain’ to grab text without formatting. Use files.export, not files.get. You’ll need service account auth and proper sharing permissions on the doc. Code’s pretty simple, maybe 50-100 lines depending on your language. I used Python with google-api-python-client and had it working in half a day. Watch out for rate limiting though. Google has API quotas, so cache the content and refresh every few minutes instead of hitting it on every page load. Extracting the document ID from sharing URLs is easy once you know the pattern.
Use Google Docs’ publish to web feature. File > Share > Publish to web, grab the HTML URL. Fetch it with any HTTP client and parse the content. Way simpler than APIs and auth tokens. I’ve used this for years - works gr8 and no rate limits.