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We have made many, many friends over 25 years of teaching about Python, Tcl, Perl, PHP, Lua, Java, C and C++ - and MySQL, Linux and Solaris/SunOS too. Our training notes are now very much out of date, but due to upward compatability most of our examples remain operational and even relevant ad you are welcome to make us if them "as seen" and at your own risk.

Lisa and I (Graham) now live in what was our training centre in Melksham - happy to meet with former delegates here - but do check ahead before coming round. We are far from inactive - rather, enjoying the times that we are retired but still healthy enough in mind and body to be active!

I am also active in many other area and still look after a lot of web sites - you can find an index ((here))
Using Perl to read Microsoft Word documents

Perl embraces new technologies and standards by providing a mechanism through which they can be supported - either built in to the Perl language itself, or through modules. This made Perl the natural choice for us recently when we wanted to automatically extract certain text from Microsoft Word documents for onwards inclusion in a database held on a Linux system.

With Perl, inevitably the hardest part of any such task is finding out how to do it - which modules to load, and from where, and how to call them. Here's the code we finally came up with:

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

$document = Win32::OLE -> GetObject($ARGV[1]);
open (FH,">$ARGV[0]");

print "Extracting Text ...\n";

$paragraphs = $document->Paragraphs();
$enumerate = new Win32::OLE::Enum($paragraphs);
while(defined($paragraph = $enumerate->Next()))
    {
    $style = $paragraph->{Style}->{NameLocal};
    print FH "+$style\n";
    $text = $paragraph->{Range}->{Text};
    $text =~ s/[\n\r]//g;
    $text =~ s/\x0b/\n/g;
    print FH "=$text\n";
    }

This example uses the Win32 modules to access the Word document (named as the second parameter of the command line) and saves each paragraph style name and contents into a plain text file (named as the first parameter on the command line).

The Win32 modules are available on the CPAN, and are also a standard part of the ActiveState distribution ... they make calls to Word itself, so this Perl application must be run on a Windows machine, and then the extracted data transferred


See also Training module - Perl with Windows

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Related Material

Perl - Use with Microsoft software

resource index - Perl
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You'll find shorter technical items at The Horse's Mouth and delegate's questions answered at the Opentalk forum.

At Well House Consultants, we provide training courses on subjects such as Ruby, Lua, Perl, Python, Linux, C, C++, Tcl/Tk, Tomcat, PHP and MySQL. We're asked (and answer) many questions, and answers to those which are of general interest are published in this area of our site.

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