Parsing word documents in .Net 2

**Cowboy Bob** · 17 August 2006, 12:31

Tell them to save it in RTF

**hyperD** · 17 August 2006, 13:02

Originally posted by mcquiggd

I am building an app that needs to dissect a Word (Office 2003) document into Titles, Paragraphs and Images, which are then ... anybody have experince of such tasks? Alexei, have you used anything similar for parsing content?

I have looked at creating a template that includes tags that I can then parse into my own format, and also IFilter, but that seems to only deal with text, not images...

The general consensus is that using Office Automation on a server is not a good idea... and the app is ASP.Net (C#)and I cant create a WinForms utility to do this...

Any pointers welcome...

On top of my head, out of depth and loosely associated.... there are some functions in MS Index Server and SharePoint object model that may extract some properties from office documents but for any more detail, I fear you need to use the Word object model, and probably on the client side as well for any thread issues.

**AtW** · 17 August 2006, 13:11

There should be .net libraries online that would allow to do the job - I will need something like this myself actually, I think I will be using converter of it to HTML and then parsing that. If you find anything useful then post here please.

A heavier way is to use Microsoft Office SDK or something like this - it has got to have some hooks into doc files, surely they should work in Visual Studio.

**DimPrawn** · 17 August 2006, 13:13

Originally posted by mcquiggd

I am building an app that needs to dissect a Word (Office 2003) document into Titles, Paragraphs and Images, which are then ... anybody have experince of such tasks? Alexei, have you used anything similar for parsing content?

I have looked at creating a template that includes tags that I can then parse into my own format, and also IFilter, but that seems to only deal with text, not images...

The general consensus is that using Office Automation on a server is not a good idea... and the app is ASP.Net (C#)and I cant create a WinForms utility to do this...

Any pointers welcome...

Word automation on a server is a big NO NO. Don't even think about it. Word was never designed as anything other than a single user application on a desktop with a full user profile loaded. It is not thread safe or re-entrant and without an interactive user logged into the Windows Desktop, many of the features will bomb. I know a company that tried to make this work and it was unreliable and caused big support issues.

Now, is it possible to have the word documents saved as Word XML documents? If so you could parse the XML to obtain the information you require.

Or simply buy this http://www.syncfusion.com/Products/p...?p=26&tab_id=0

**MrsGoof** · 17 August 2006, 13:15

open doc in OpenOffice save in OD... that XLM standard, hen its a piece of err umm you know.

Alternatively scan the OO code to find out how it parses MS Word docs.

**mcquiggd** · 17 August 2006, 17:32

Originally posted by hyperD

On top of my head, out of depth and loosely associated.... there are some functions in MS Index Server and SharePoint object model that may extract some properties from office documents but for any more detail, I fear you need to use the Word object model, and probably on the client side as well for any thread issues.

Thats where IFilter comes in... I wrote a little utility using it today and it does allow you to get chunks of text, but its more for simply grabbing x amounts of chars into a buffer than being able to say 'get next paragraph'... might be sufficient for you Alexei - I have seen an example on codesmith that uses dotLucerne to search content extracted using IFilter - the relevant implementation is loaded according to the file type. It is more geared towards searching filesystems, but you can also stream content into the IFilter implementation which is probably what you want (I know I do).

**TheMonkey** · 17 August 2006, 19:34

You can use the Office Web Components on a server safely WITHOUT the overhead or problems with using Word through COM. They can only READ a document using the same object model as Excel and Word.

Don't ever bother thinking about creating word documents on the server. Third party is the ONLY option, or using a Word macro on a dedicated box to batch process stuff. Yuck.

**mcquiggd** · 17 August 2006, 20:47

Monkey, that sounds interesting - I am purely reading the word document and extracting its content into my object hierarchy for display via a reasonably complex website.... I do not have to, (nor want to!) create word documents - I ignore them once I have retrieved the data I want.

The people submitting the content are rather well known on TV and submit articles for publication from laptops in Word 2003... and as always I like to keep it simple....

**vetran** · 18 August 2006, 11:46

which parts?

if you are talking about properties such as title etc & custom properties they will go straight into a sharepoint list and autofill the columns.

They can be added offline using Colligio Contributor or Digilink revelation.

Security is taken care of and you will be able to full text search if you use full SQL server as the back end.

Sharepoint, rotating not reinventing the wheel!

Parsing word documents in .Net 2