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

Hello. I seek to extract a single line from a Microsoft Word document using OLE. Here is my code thus far (it's not much): 
use warnings;
use strict;
use OLE;

my $word = CreateObject OLE "Word.Application";
$word -> {Visible} = 1;
my $document = $word -> Documents -> Open("C:/file_to_open.doc");

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Like I said, it's not much. Now, I know how to extract the contents of the entire file using this line -- 
my $text = $document -> {Content} -> {Text};

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-- But this doesn't do me much good. I instead want only the fourth line of the document. Can anyone help me? Thank you in advance.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Extract Single Line of Text from Word Document Using OLE
by jdporter (Paladin) on Jun 22, 2005 at 19:08 UTC
    Here's how I did it. I recorded a macro in Word so as to highlight the 4th line, then took the resulting VB script and converted it to perl. Note that I made it open the doc in the background, i.e. not visible, and read-only; and I quit as soon as I'm done getting the data I wanted. 
    use Win32::OLE;
use strict;

my $docfile = "C:/file_to_open.doc";

my $w = new Win32::OLE 'Word.Application' or die;
$w->{'Visible'} = 0;
my $doc = $w->Documents->Open($docfile,0,1,0);
$w->Selection->MoveDown({ Unit=>5, Count=>3 });
$w->Selection->EndKey({ Unit=>5, Extend=>1 });
print $w->Selection->Text;
$doc->Close(0);
$w->Quit(0);

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    This uses Win32::OLE rather than OLE as yours does; the interfaces look similar enough.
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[d/l]

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