When working with Word documents, sometimes you may need to adjust the content or layout of the document by deleting certain paragraphs. For example, when you have copied a very long paragraph from the Internet, you can delete redundant paragraphs as needed and keep only the useful ones. Or you can create a new document by deleting irrelevant paragraphs in an existing document. In this case, performing this process programmatically is a better option than tedious manual deletion, which can help you batch process a large number of documents in a short period of time. In this article, we will show you how to remove a specific paragraph or all paragraphs from Word documents in python using Spire.Doc for Python.

• Delete a Specific Paragraph from Word Documents
• Delete All Paragraphs from Word Documents

Install Spire.Doc for Python

This scenario requires Spire.Doc for Python and plum-dispatch v1.7.4. They can be easily installed in your Windows through the following pip command.

pip install Spire.Doc

If you are unsure how to install, please refer to this tutorial: How to Install Spire.Doc for Python on Windows

Delete a Specific Paragraph from Word Documents

With Spire.Doc for Python library, you are allowed to remove specific paragraphs from Word documents. You just need to get the desired section, and then call the Section.Paragraphs.RemoveAt() method to remove the paragraphs you want. The detailed steps are as follows.

• Create an object of Document class.
• Load a Word document from disk using Document.LoadFromFile() method.
• Get the first section of this file using Document.Sections[] property.
• Remove the first paragraph from this section using Section.Paragraphs.RemoveAt() method.
• Save the result file using Document.SaveToFile() method.

from spire.doc import *
from spire.doc.common import *

inputFile = "C:/Users/Administrator/Desktop/Sample.docx"
outputFile = "C:/Users/Administrator/Desktop/RemoveParagraphs.docx"
    
#Create an object of Document class
document = Document()

#Load a sample file from disk
document.LoadFromFile(inputFile)

#Get the first section of this file
section=document.Sections[0]

#Remove the first paragraph from this section
section.Paragraphs.RemoveAt(0)

#Save the result file
document.SaveToFile(outputFile, FileFormat.Docx2013)
document.Close()

Delete All Paragraphs from Word Documents

In addition, if you want to clear all paragraphs of the Word document at once, please loop through all sections first and call the Section.Paragraphs.Clear() method to do that. The detailed steps are as follows.

• Create an object of Document class.
• Load a Word document from disk using Document.LoadFromFile() method.
• Loop through all sections first and remove all paragraphs in each section by using Section.Paragraphs.Clear() method.
• Save the result file using Document.SaveToFile() method.

from spire.doc import *
from spire.doc.common import *

inputFile = "C:/Users/Administrator/Desktop/Sample.docx"
outputFile = "C:/Users/Administrator/Desktop/RemoveAllParagraphs.docx"
    
#Create an object of Document class
document = Document()

#Load a sample file from disk
document.LoadFromFile(inputFile)

#Remove paragraphs from the body of every section in the document
for i in range(document.Sections.Count):
    section = document.Sections.get_Item(i)
    section.Paragraphs.Clear()

#Save the result file
document.SaveToFile(outputFile, FileFormat.Docx2013)
document.Close()

Apply for a Temporary License

If you'd like to remove the evaluation message from the generated documents, or to get rid of the function limitations, please request a 30-day trial license for yourself.