It's not Perl-only, but maybe antiword can help you. It's a program which can read Word files and output plain text and PostScript files. The bolding/italic formatting is not preserved, but it does a pretty good job of getting the text out of it.

Arjen

In reply to Re: Need help with perl only parsing of M$ word file by Aragorn
in thread Need help with perl only parsing of M$ word file by dwhitney

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