in reply to Win32 Word behaving strangely

the reason of slowness is in your seemingly innocent  Item($i)

This construct in MS-Word is not an array-like access, but rather it goes every time from 1 to $i to access $i-th element

This gives access time O(N) instead of O(1), and your loop O(N^2), which is bad.

Plus you use this several times in a loop.

A typical workaround - use something like that: 

use Win32::OLE qw(in);
@items = in $doc->Words->Items;

[download]

Been there, seen that :)

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Re^2: Win32 Word behaving strangely
by cormanaz (Deacon) on Jul 28, 2006 at 20:48 UTC
    I knew it had to be something like that. But I tried your fix, a la 
    use strict;
use Win32::OLE qw( in );
use Win32::OLE::Const 'Microsoft Word';

my $filename = 'E:\test.doc';

my $word = Win32::OLE->new('Word.Application', 'Quit');
my $doc = $word->Documents->Open($filename) || die("Unable to open doc
+ument ", Win32::OLE->LastError());
my $nwords = $doc->Words->Count;

my @wordtext;
my @wordcolor;

my $starttime = time;

my @items = in $doc->Words->Items;

for(my $i = 1; $i <= $nwords; $i++)    {
    $wordcolor[$i] = $items[$i]->HighlightColorIndex;
    $wordtext[$i] = $items[$i]->Text;
}

    [download]

    and @items comes back null.

[reply]
[d/l]
      try 'in $doc->Words;' instead of 'in $doc->Words->Items;'
[reply]
      'in' do not always work good...
      But you can try work at paragraph level, so 
      my @paras = in $doc->Paragraphs;# or so

      [download]

      BTW even $doc->Words->Count will traverse entire document content... so be careful!

      Also I would suggest you to slurp entire document content... but then it will be difficult to get access to word in the middle... so this may be not a good advice...

[reply]
[d/l]

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