Extracting page-specific content from Google Docs using API

Other Questions Google docs
1

Hey folks, I’m stuck with a tricky situation. I’m trying to get content from Google Docs, but I need to know which page each bit of text or image is on. I’ve managed to export the doc as HTML, but there’s no clear way to tell where one page ends and another begins.

Here’s what I’ve done so far:

api_url = 'docs.google.com/export'
params = {
    'doc_id': 'my_document_id',
    'format': 'html'
}
response = requests.get(api_url, params=params)
html_content = response.text

The HTML I get back doesn’t have any page markers or classes that show page numbers. I just want to pull out the text and images while knowing which page they’re from. Any ideas on how to tackle this? Maybe there’s a different API method I should be using? Or is there a way to parse the HTML to figure out the page breaks? Thanks for any help!

2

try using the google docs api directly. its ‘documents.get’ method returns a json that includes pagebreaks. looping through doc[‘body’][‘content’] should give you both text and images per page. its easier than parsing html. might work well for u.

3

I have wrestled with this issue before and it remains one of those tricky challenges. The Google Docs API does not offer a straightforward method for retrieving page-specific content. In my experience, exporting the document as a PDF can provide a more reliable solution. Once you have a PDF, you can use a library like PyPDF2 or pdfplumber to extract text and images page by page, which allows you to identify page breaks more clearly. This method requires a bit more handling for layout consistency, but it has worked well for me in maintaining page integrity.

4

I’ve encountered this challenge in my work with document processing. While the HTML export doesn’t provide page markers, I’ve found success using the Google Docs API’s ‘documents.get’ method. This approach returns a structured JSON representation of the document, including page breaks.

Here’s a snippet that might help:

from googleapiclient.discovery import build

service = build('docs', 'v1', credentials=credentials)
document = service.documents().get(documentId=DOCUMENT_ID).execute()

for element in document['body']['content']:
    if 'pageBreak' in element:
        print('New page')
    elif 'paragraph' in element:
        print(element['paragraph']['elements'][0]['textRun']['content'])

This method allows you to iterate through the document’s content, identifying page breaks and extracting text accordingly. It’s more precise than parsing HTML and has worked reliably in my projects.