Given the url containing a certain file, in this case a word document, read the contents of the document. I have seen several examples of how to extract text from local documents but not from a url. Would it be the same from an http address than from an ftp?

from urllib.request import urlopenurl = 'ftp://path/to/file.docx'txt = urlopen(url).read()

the value of text is:

b'PK\x03\x04\x14\x00\x06\x00\x08\x00\x00\x00!\x00\xdd\xfc\x957f\x01\x00\x00 \x05\x00\x00\x13\x00\x08\x02[Content_Types].xml \xa2\x04\x02(\xa0\x00\x02\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00 ...'

I try to decode

txt.decode("utf-8", "ignore")

but this returns PK ... followed by other strange characters

The option to save the document and then process it is not feasible.

What am I doing wrong?

By using requests and docx2txt it's very simple:

import requests
import docx2txt
from io import BytesIOurl = "http://url.to.file/sample.docx"
docx = BytesIO(requests.get(url).content)# extract text
text = docx2txt.process(docx)