**Summary.** The `python-docx` table API is designed for _uniform_
tables (no merged cells, no nested tables). Naive processing of DOCX
tables using this API produces duplicate text when the table has merged
cells. Add a more sophisticated parsing method that reads only "root"
cells (those with an actual `<tc>` element) and skip cells spanned by a
merge.
In the process, abandon use of the `tabulate` package for this job
(which is also designed for uniform tables) and remove the whitespace
padding it adds for visual alignment of columns. Separate the text for
each cell with a single newline ("\n").
Since it's little extra trouble, add support for nested tables such that
their text also contributes to the `Table.text` string.
The new `._iter_table_texts()` method will also be used for parsing
tables in headers and footers (where they are frequently used for layout
purposes) in a closely following PR.
Fixes#2106.
A DOCX document that has no sections can still contain one or more
tables. Such files are never created by Word but Word can open them just
fine. These can be and are generated by other applications.
Use the newly-added `Document.iter_inner_content()` method added
upstream in `python-docx` to capture both paragraphs and tables from a
section-less DOCX document.
This generalizes the fix for MS Teams chat-transcripts (an example of
sectionless-docx) implemented in #1825.
In DOCX, like HTML, a table cell can itself contain a table. This is not
uncommon and is typically used for formatting purposes.
When a DOCX table is nested, create nested HTML tables to reflect that
structure and create a plain-text table with captures all the text in
nested tables, formatting it as a reasonable facsimile of a table.
This implements the solution described and spiked in PR #1952.
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Co-authored-by: Bruno Bornsztein <bruno.bornsztein@gmail.com>
Reviewers: I recommend reviewing commit-by-commit or just looking at the
final version of `partition/docx.py` as View File.
This refactor solves a few problems but mostly lays the groundwork to
allow us to refine further aspects such as page-break detection,
list-item detection, and moving python-docx internals upstream to that
library so our work doesn't depend on that domain-knowledge.
