如何使用 Python API 在 Google Docs 中找到子字符串的 startIndex

Question

Following the Google Docs API documentation recommendation , I've created a document template, containing " placeholders " such as {{my_text_goes_here}} in order to use the replaceAllText request to substitute the placeholder with my own text. So far so good.

However, not only I want to insert new text, but I also want to format it. My problem is to retrieve the startIndex of this new text (or of the previous placeholder). There aren't any find or locate request in the API.

I've tried to retrieve the text of the whole document ( guide here ), find the position of my placeholder in the text, and use it as the startIndex for the formatting of my new text (using the updateTextStyle request) . Unfortunately, this value is incorrect and the format isn't applied where it should be. I suppose it might have to do with UTF-16 encoding or some hidden character...

What I'm trying to do is a very basic action but it requires such complex code to achieve that it renders the whole API useless, except for basic invoice combination (which we could already do 20 years ago with Word and Outlook...)

What am I missing??

Answer 1

Might not be as basic as you would like it to be, but what you can do:

Use the method documents.get setting fields to body/content/paragraph/elements(startIndex,textRun/content) .

This will return you a JSON of type:

{
  "body": {
    "content": [
      {},
      {
        "paragraph": {
          "elements": [
            {
              "startIndex": 1,
              "textRun": {
                "content": "freter"
              }
            },
            {
              "startIndex": 7,
              "textRun": {
                "content": "\n"
              }
            }
          ]
        }
      },
      {
        "paragraph": {
          "elements": [
            {
              "startIndex": 8,
              "textRun": {
                "content": "Htrhyt "
              }
            },
            {
              "startIndex": 15,
              "textRun": {
                "content": "{{my_text_goes_here}}"
              }
            },
            {
              "startIndex": 36,
              "textRun": {
                "content": "  gtrtry\n"
              }
            }
          ]
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}

Then you can programmaticaly the content of each textRun against {{my_text_goes_here}} and retrieve the startIndex of the matching elements .

For the sample above your result would be:

           {
              "startIndex": 15,
              "textRun": {
                "content": "{{my_text_goes_here}}"
              }
            }