saving as a .doc?

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

I have a client that wants form data written as a doc then sent as an attachment instead of just sending the form data as text. I can probably figure out how to send attachments with Mail::Mailer, but I don't know how OR if it's even possible to write a .doc file (the client doesn't want a .txt and I'm not exactly sure if I can just use the extension and have it read as a document).

Any information on this you can give me would be very much appreciated.

Comment on saving as a .doc?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: saving as a .doc? by matthewb (Curate) on Feb 05, 2004 at 06:39 UTC
Open a file called `whatever.doc' and use RTF::Writer to populate it with your client's data. MB	[reply]
Re: saving as a .doc? by neuroball (Pilgrim) on Feb 05, 2004 at 04:33 UTC
You might want to look into using OpenOffice.org, a productivity suite very much like Office, that can files in the .DOC format. You might want to read this node about OpenOffice.org and how you can access it using a perl interface. Though you might need to look at the ooolib API for opening a text file and re-saving it in the .DOC format. /oliver/ Hans: Not ze problem!	[reply]
Re: Re: saving as a .doc? by insite2000 (Acolyte) on Feb 06, 2004 at 02:41 UTC
I think a few of the folks are on the right track. Actually, if they don't care about formatting, you can just save a plain ASCII file but using a .doc extension. When your client gets it, Word will open it. Not pretty, but easy. Otherwise I'd go with matthewb's or MCS's suggestion about the RTF modules. And as far as mailing the attachment, Mail::Mailer may work - I've also had great luck with MIME::Lite.	[reply]
Re: saving as a .doc? by Zero_Flop (Pilgrim) on Feb 05, 2004 at 05:19 UTC
Platform? If Win then you could use OLE. If Linux/Unix you will have to go with OpenOffice as suggested.	[reply]
Re: saving as a .doc? by MCS (Monk) on Feb 05, 2004 at 16:53 UTC
First, you need to specify a little more. First, if this is all hapening on Windows, you can look at Win32::OLE However, if these forms you are talking about are web forms running on say UNIX, there is no way (as far as I know) to create a .doc using perl. Open Office may work but I don't know if you can automate it in perl or not. Perhaps you may want to look at using something like an .rtf file instead of a word file so you could use something like RTF::Document and your client can still open it in word and have formatting.	[reply]