How to get cell background color in python-docx?

Question

I'm trying to read data from MS Word table using python-docx. There is a way to set background color of a table cell:

tcPr = cell._tc.get_or_add_tcPr()
shd = OxmlElement("w:shd")
shd.set(qn("w:fill"), rgb2hex(*color))
tcPr.append(shd)

My task is contrary, I need to get the existing color. I'm not skilled in xml and I tried this:

cell = table.cell(row, col)
tcPr = cell._tc.get_or_add_tcPr().get(qn('w:shd'))

How ever it returns me None for each read cell regardless of its color.

Answer 1

As scanny said, you should first be sure of the element/property you are looking for.

But to read the value of this element you should rather use the find method.

Ex:

cell._tc.get_or_add_tcPr().get(qn('w:shd')) #Returns None
cell._tc.get_or_add_tcPr().find(qn('w:shd')) #Returns <Element {http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main}shd at ...>

Answer 2

As scanny proposed, I used parsing cell._tc.xml:

pattern = re.compile('w:fill=\"(\S*)\"')
match = pattern.search(cell._tc.xml)
result = match.group(1)

If there is data on color it returns either "auto" or hex code of background color which can be converted to RGB.