Read, fill, and edit Korean HWP (Hancom Office) documents in Python. Extract text for LLM / RAG pipelines, fill government & university forms programmatically, and rewrite the binary without corrupting it.

Korean government, universities, and most Korean enterprises run on .hwp — the binary format Hancom Office uses. If you need to ingest Korean enterprise documents into an LLM, automate form filling at scale, or just edit an HWP file without manually clicking through Hancom, hwpkit is the missing piece.

Under the hood, HWP 5.0 is a Microsoft Compound File Binary (MS-CFB) container holding a DocInfo stream and one or more Section streams (raw deflate). The standard olefile library can only rewrite a stream if it stays the same byte length, which is rarely true when you're inserting Korean text. hwpkit rewrites the whole CFB container while preserving the directory tree topology Hancom validates on open.

Scope: targets HWP 5.0 (the binary .hwp format Hancom Office has shipped since 2010). The newer XML-based .hwpx format is not covered — for .hwpx you can edit the inner OWPML XML directly with any zip

• XML library.

Install

Python 3.9 or newer.

pip install hwpkit

Quickstart

from hwpkit import fill_hwp, inject_text, swap_in_para_text, replace_text

def edit(records):
    inject_text(records, 24, "홍길동")                      # fill empty cell
    swap_in_para_text(records, 40, "□ 석사", "☑ 석사")      # tick checkbox
    replace_text(records, 75, "2026. 05. 19.")            # rewrite a cell

fill_hwp("template.hwp", "out.hwp", edit)

Finding paragraph indices

hwpkit-inspect template.hwp

Prints one line per record with a text preview, so you can identify which paragraph index is which form cell.

Extracting plain text

hwpkit-text file.hwp

Walks every section, strips inline controls (tables, images, footnote refs, etc.) and prints just the literal character content. From Python:

from hwpkit import extract_text_from_hwp
print(extract_text_from_hwp("file.hwp"))

For semantic HWP → XML (OWPML) conversion, use pyhwp — that's a much bigger job.

For LLM / RAG pipelines

Korean enterprises ship contracts, policies, regulations, government notices, internal memos, and academic papers as .hwp. If your retrieval / RAG pipeline can't read HWP, it can't index Korean enterprise data. The standard text-extraction stack (pdfplumber, python-docx, unstructured) doesn't cover HWP — they all need a preprocessing step.

hwpkit is that step. The library has no LLM dependencies; it's just a clean Korean-text source you can plug into anything:

# Index every HWP in a directory tree as documents for a vector DB
import glob
from hwpkit import extract_text_from_hwp

for path in glob.glob("corpus/**/*.hwp", recursive=True):
    text = extract_text_from_hwp(path)
    vector_db.add(doc_id=path, content=text)

# One-shot: pipe an HWP into any LLM CLI
hwpkit-text contract.hwp | llm "Summarize the key obligations in Korean"

# Bulk: convert a folder of HWPs to .txt for downstream tooling
for f in *.hwp; do hwpkit-text "$f" > "${f%.hwp}.txt"; done

The extractor walks every Section* stream, decodes UTF-16LE, and strips inline controls (tables, images, footnote refs, autonumbers, page-number ctrls, bookmarks) so what you get is clean text — usable directly as input to chunkers, embeddings, or any LLM context.

Edit operations

Function	When to use	What it does
inject_text(records, i, text)	The paragraph is empty (cell on a blank template)	Adds a PARA_TEXT record, updates the char count, and dummies the cached layout
swap_in_para_text(records, i, old, new)	Same-length substring swap (checkboxes □ → ☑, single-char rewrites)	Pure byte replace; keeps the cached layout intact
replace_text(records, i, text)	Paragraph has existing text you want to overwrite entirely	Rewrites PARA_TEXT, updates char count, dummies layout if length changed
charshape.flatten_to_face(rec, face_id)	Mixed-script paragraph (Korean + English) won't pick up font changes	Sets all 7 per-script CharShape slots to the same face — see GOTCHAS §3

What's tricky about HWP

See docs/GOTCHAS.md. The short version:

• PARA_LINE_SEG cache — when a paragraph grows, the cached layout record must be replaced with 36 zero bytes. Anything else (keep, delete, fake multi-segment) either trips Hancom's corruption check or makes text render on a single smashed line.
• CharShape has seven font slots — Hangul / Latin / Hanja / Japanese / Symbol / User / Other. Hancom's font dropdown typically only changes the Hangul slot, so mixed-script paragraphs need explicit per-slot control via hwpkit.charshape.
• replace_text("") corrupts the file — wiping a paragraph to empty produces a (chars=1, PARA_TEXT="\r") state that opens fine alone but fails Hancom's checks when combined with other edits. Use a space or em-dash placeholder.
• Naive CFB writers fail RB-tree validation — Hancom validates the red-black-tree directory invariants on open. hwpkit.cfb reads the original tree pointers byte-for-byte and reuses them.

Comparison

	pyhwp	olefile	hwpkit
Extract plain text	✅	❌	✅
Convert HWP → XML / OWPML (semantic)	✅	❌	❌
Read raw streams	✅	✅	✅
Rewrite same-size stream	❌	✅	✅
Rewrite stream that grew/shrank	❌	❌	✅
Hancom accepts the output	n/a	only if same-size	✅

See also

• pyhwp — comprehensive HWP→XML converter. hwpkit learned the record format and the dummy-LineSeg trick from reading its source.
• olefile — read-side dependency.
• The HWP 5.0 spec from Hancom (Korean).

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

---

Made by Ebenworks