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

I'm writing a little program to parse recipe files for personal use and then putting the results in a database. I have it working on regular text files and now I would like to conquer the recipes my uncle typed up in word. Unfortunately, I don't have a windows machine to use the Win32::OLE modules.

Is there a way to get the text from a word file in a UN*X environment in perl? (I have both linux and OS X) I searched CPAN but seemed to only come up with windows solutions.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: parsing word on non-windows platform
by b10m (Vicar) on Jan 25, 2004 at 22:00 UTC

    As discussed before, a "good" way to start is by running your MS Word files through antiword. That will create a plaintext version, which you might parse.

    HTH

    --
    b10m
[reply]
      available for many platforms, gnu, src and binary - " ...Antiword is able to convert Word documents to plain text, to PostScript and to XML/DocBook ...

      thanks. this is just the tool I need. It is a shorter path than doc->html-ps->pdf. while the tool has no perl bindings (to my knowledge) I can just cron a perl (python) script to convert a directory of doc files to pdf via ps.

      update: matts (axkit) just left a message on my use.perl journal reporting that he recommends using HTMLDOC for converting html to pdf. It also has an Axkit plugin. I checked out the man and faq. GNU licensing, perl bindings and end user support available.

[reply]

      Thanks, this seems to be just what I needed. Now if only I knew how to make a perl module to wrap it.

[reply]
        Take a look at SWISH::Filter, part of the incredible search engine SWISH-E.

        From the page above:

        SWISH::Filter provides a unified way to convert documents into a type that swish-e can index.

        Hope this helps,
        mobiGeek.

[reply]
Re: parsing word on non-windows platform
by neuroball (Pilgrim) on Jan 25, 2004 at 21:58 UTC

    Hi MCS, we have already a node where we discussed the conversion from Word to PDF files. You might want to take a look at it and just replace 'PDF' with 'Textfile'. I.e. the OpenOffice solutions should be what you were searching for.

    /oliver/

    Hans: Not ze problem!
[reply]
Re: parsing word on non-windows platform
by dominix (Deacon) on Jan 25, 2004 at 22:15 UTC
    there is a library wv ware that do this on *nix, you may want to make a perl Module that wrap it. :-)
    --
    dominix
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Re: parsing word on non-windows platform
by punchcard_don (Beadle) on Jan 26, 2004 at 14:45 UTC
    Sometimes low-tech just as effective and a lot simpler.

    Just open the Word files in Word, hit "Save as...", and opt to save as .txt

    Reload the files on the server and parse them.

[reply]

      yes but when you have many word documents, this starts to become tedious. "Laziness, Impatience and Hubris" make a good programmer ;-)

[reply]
        Had (apparently mistakenly) imagined that "recipes my uncle typed up" meant a reasonable number of documents. How many recipes can one uncle type? At ~20-seconds per document, open-save-close, that's 180 recipes in an hour, far inferior to the time to develop, test and implement a server-side solution. Probably inferior to the time to post a question and read silly replies! :-)
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Re: parsing word on non-windows platform
by Willard B. Trophy (Hermit) on Jan 26, 2004 at 14:35 UTC
    For very quick parsing, this usually works for me: 
      strings file.doc | fmt -s
    Yes, you do get some extra guff, but if you are looking for particular words, this will pick them out.

    --
    bowling trophy thieves, die!

[reply]

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