On the other hand, if you need to run the script on a UNIX/Linux box you are probably out of luck in native Perl. As far as I know there is no Perl module which can parse Word .docs. The format is *very* hairy.

You might have success calling word2x from Perl and parsing the output.

Hi Thanks for your reply. I am running it on a windows machine. Please show/send me the example code. Thanks Saran

Here is some code that *might* work for you. I say *might* because I do not have win32 perl installed where I am, and my download is stuck at 1% ;) So take this for what it's worth; this is a starting point for your code. This is cribbed together from some win32 code I have in my home directory.

use Win32::OLE;
use Win32::OLE::Enum;

# this $text will hold all the text of all the word docs
my $text="";

# this is how we start Word from Perl
my $word=Win32::OLE->new("Word.Application");

# for every file in the current directory
foreach my $filename (<*.doc>)
{
    # tell Word to open the file we just found
    my $doc=$word->Documents->Open($filename);

    # get an object representing all the paragraphs in the doc
    my $paragraphs=new Win32::OLE::Enum($doc->Paragraphs());

    # for every paragraph...
    while(defined($paragraph = $paragraphs->Next()))
    {
        # append the paragraph text to $text
        $text.=$paragraph->{Range}->{Text};
    }
}    

foreach my $line (split(/\r\n/,$text))
{
    # this bit DEFINITELY doesn't work!
    if (/some pattern/)
    {
        ..do something..
    }
}
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