Greetings,

On Win32, you may want to consider: 

use Win32::OLE;
my $word=Win32::OLE->new('word.application');
my $doc=$word->Documents->Open('C:\foo\bar.doc');
my $text=$doc->{Text};
#
$text=~s/\r/\n/g;

[download]
OK, so this yelds all the text of the document. If the text is inside text boxes (for instance) it will not be in $text.
But $doc contains the entire DOM, so you can get at every part of the document, and churn it to your heart's content... so to speak. Your mileage will vary according to the complexity and variability of the structure of your document, etc. 
perl -MWin32::OLE -d -e 42

[download]
will be your friend...
Cheers,
alf
You can't have everything: where would you put it?

In reply to Re: Snarfing data from microsoft word by alien_life_form
in thread Snarfing data from microsoft word by Preceptor

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.