Open a Microsoft Word Doc and Save as plain text file

[soon_j]

Monks good day! Do you happen to have a simple routine or Perl module that allows me to open a microsoft word file and allow me to save it in a plain text format?

Or if not... is there a module that can identify the file of type if it's a Word document, RTF document, plain text, PDF, or image?

I just need to check if the file uploaded is a plain text (the only type I need).

Thanks!

[sgifford]

I'm not aware of a pure-Perl solution for parsing MS Word documents. A search on http://freshmeat.net turns up a few programs that can do the conversion, or you can use blue_cowdawg's suggestion of Win32::OLE if you're on a Windows system with Word (and you trust the documents not to do anything nasty, like take over the computer where your script is running).

File::Type can help you identify the type of the file.

[soon_j]

Thank you monks for your inputs.

I found this code from CGI to be very good in determining the type of file



my $cgi = new CGI;
my $file = $cgi->param('file');
my $type = $cgi->uploadInfo($file)->{'Content-Type'};

[sgifford]

Ah, yes, good idea. It does rely on the client to identify the document, though; if the user's Web browser doesn't know what the file is, it will probably be reported to you as application/octet-stream or text/plain if it smells like text.

[blue_cowdawg]

Do you happen to have a simple routine or Perl module that allows me to open a microsoft word file and allow me to save it in a plain text format?

You know, Kind Monk, there is a CPAN Search Mechanism that allows you to search for such things. I tried it myself (albeait not too strenuously) and came up dry.

However, if you are trying this on an Evil Empire® system you might want to investigate doing something with Win32::OLE, but I'm not an expert in its use so can't help you more.

[jplindstrom]

You should look into Win32::OLE, Win32::Word::Writer, or Antiword.

/J

[davorg]

It's not Perl, but I find wvware to be very useful.