This Linux Journal article by Kamran Husain highlights the basic structure of ODF files, and some internals of
the underlying XML files and shows how to use Python to read the contents to
perform a simple search for keywords. The code also can be the basis for
more-advanced operations. In the spirit of openness, open-source
software is used to read the ODF files, which in this case are Python and the
OpenOffice.org package.