boat73 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello wise ones. I have a script that opens a Word Document, saves it as a txt document. This code works fine. Does anyone know of a way to capture the text from the word document into an array without saving it to a txt document first? Below is the working code and as always I am open to any and all criticism both good and bad. Thanks in advance. 
  use Win32::OLE;
  use constant wdCRLF => 0;
  use constant wdFormatText => 2;
  use constant wdOpenFormatAuto => 0;
  $doc = "c:\\temp\\test.doc";
  $txtdoc = "$ENV{TEMP}\\reportmacro.txt";
  $Win32::OLE::Warn = 3;  
  my $wd_object = (Win32::OLE->GetActiveObject('Word.Application') ||
                     Win32::OLE->new('Word.Application', 'Quit'));
  
  ##### MAKE WORD APP VISIBLE(1), NOT VISIBLE(0) ####
  $wd_object -> {Visible}            = 1;
  
  $wd_object->Documents->Open({FileName => "$doc", ConfirmConversions 
+=> 0, ReadOnly => 0,
                                 AddToRecentFiles => 0, PasswordDocume
+nt => '', PasswordTemplate => '',
                                 Revert => 0, WritePasswordDocument =>
+ '', WritePasswordTemplate => '',
                                 Format => wdOpenFormatAuto, XMLTransf
+orm => ''});
  $wd_object->ActiveDocument->SaveAs({FileName => "$txtdoc", FileForma
+t => wdFormatText, LockComments => 0,
                                        password => '', AddToRecentFil
+es => 1, WritePassword => '',
                                        ReadOnlyRecommended => 0, Embe
+dTrueTypeFonts => 0,
                                        SaveNativePictureFormat => 0, 
+SaveFormsData => 0,
                                        SaveAsAOCELetter => 0, Encodin
+g => 1252, InsertLineBreaks => 1,
                                        AllowSubstitutions => 0, LineE
+nding => wdCRLF});
  $wd_object->ActiveDocument->Close();

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Re: Pull all text from msword document
by wfsp (Abbot) on Jul 22, 2005 at 16:57 UTC 
    #!/bin/perl5

use strict;
use warnings;
use Win32::OLE;

my $w = Win32::OLE->GetActiveObject('Word.Application');

my $d = $w->ActiveDocument;
my $paras = $d->Paragraphs;

my @word;
foreach my $para (in $paras) {
 my $text = $para->Range->{text};
 chop $text; # remove /r
 push @word, $text;
}

print "$_\n" for @word;

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[reply]
[d/l]
      Perfect, tyhanks so much. I have also added the warnings and strict to the code. Thanks to all those that responded.
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Re: Pull all text from msword document
by socketdave (Curate) on Jul 22, 2005 at 16:59 UTC
    I've always used a program called antiword for this:

    http://www.winfield.demon.nl/

    I wonder how much trouble it would be to incorporate this work into a Perl module that could take this out of win32::ole territory...
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Re: Pull all text from msword document
by davidrw (Prior) on Jul 22, 2005 at 16:52 UTC
    a few random thoughts:
    • add use strict; and use warnings;
    • I assume the SaveAs() method has to take a filename and not a filehandle.. if it could take a filehandle IO::Scalar would help you out..
    • If you do the equivalent of a "select all", what data type/structure do you get? can you get plain text from that?
    • If you do a "select all" and "copy" to shove it into the clipboard, is it any easier to get the plain text from that? (this is probably not the ideal route)
    • Using a temp file isn't the worst thing in the world.. File::Temp will make it easier, too.
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