roho has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am attempting to read an MS Word document. The test file contains the text: Line 1, (blank line), Line 2, (blank line). The call to "GetObject" returns undef and $! is empty.

I am running Strawberry Perl 5.24.1 on Windows 10 with Win32::OLE version 0.1712 (the latest version according to metacpan). This should be very straightforward, but I cannot see what I am missing here. TIA for any suggestions. 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

use Win32::OLE;
use Win32::OLE::Enum;

my $document   = Win32::OLE->GetObject("C:\\tmpx\\test.docx") or die "
+GetObject failed: $!\n";
my $paragraphs = $document->Paragraphs();
my $enumerate  = new Win32::OLE::Enum($paragraphs);

while(defined(my $paragraph = $enumerate->Next())) {
    my $text = $paragraph->{Range}->{Text};
    $text =~ s/[\n\r]//g;
    $text =~ s/\x0b/\n/g;
    print "$text\n";
}

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Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Win32::OLE->GetObject Fails on MS Word Document
by davies (Monsignor) on Dec 16, 2020 at 22:39 UTC

    Try something like:

    use strict;
use warnings;
use Win32::OLE;

my $word = Win32::OLE->new('Word.Application');
$word->{Visible} = 1;
my $filename = 'C:/tmpx/test.docx';
my $document = $word->Documents->Open($filename);

    [download]

    GetObject is something I rarely use or recommend. It is trying to take control of an existing instance of word, which may be doing anything. Create your own instance and you know it's clean. There isn't an instance of an application called "C:\\tmpx\\test.docx" for Perl to grab (although there may be an instance of word that is using this file), so it fails quite correctly.

    Regards,

    John Davies

    Update: fixed typo in text

[reply]
[d/l]
      Thank you davies. That works fine. Leaves me wondering what (if anything) GetObject is good for.

      "It's not how hard you work, it's how much you get done."

[reply]

        If you really need to access a running instance, that's what GetObject does. It's very rare, but can be useful if you are doing weird things and can end up with invisible instances that you want to close down elegantly rather than through the task manager. It can also be useful if you need to do some manual work first and then let the code take over.

        Regards,

        John Davies

[reply]
Re: Win32::OLE->GetObject Fails on MS Word Document
by GrandFather (Saint) on Dec 16, 2020 at 23:01 UTC

    Works fine for me with Perl V5.32.0 MSWin32-x64-multi-thread on Windows 10. Are you sure your file path is correct and the file isn't locked (opened by something else)? You could try checking that the file exists:

    ...

my $docPath = 'D:\Delme~~\test.docx';

print "Found file '$docPath'\n" if -f $docPath;

my $document   = Win32::OLE->GetObject($docPath) or die "GetObject fai
+led: $!\n";

...

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