How can I parse Word Documents and convert to XML

[WestSide2003]

Hi,

I wanted to parse MS Word Documents either (.doc, .rtf, etc)

And basically convert them to XML.

Is there a Word Parser or something that will extract information from a Word Doc??

My main goal is to convert a .doc file into xml format...

Can anyone help here?

Thanks....

 

[palbano]

MS Office 2003

-pete

 

[WestSide2003]

Ok...

That will work for an individual but we are wanting to have a process on our website/server that converts files from .doc, .rtf, .html, etc to xml automatically.

I am more than sure in Office 2003, you can open a doc, and just hit convert, but we are looking more for a solution that runs on the server, when a user uploads a document in .doc format for example, it will be converted to a structured format (xml)automatically... we have thousands of documents..

Any thoughts?

Thanks..

-WestSide

 

[dwarfthrower]

Unfortunately the .doc format is a proprietary binary format, so it would take a fair amount of code to extract the structure of it into xml. You would first need to know how the file was structured (I'm sure M$ won't be putting that into the public domain anytime soon)

There are products on the market that already do this though:

http://www.cambridgedocs.com/

http://www.yawcpro.com/

http://webworks.com/jump/word/default.aspx?referrer=0-30a003

http://www.docsoft.com/w2xmlv2.htm

Even a freebie:

http://www.tetrasix.com/

 

[palbano]

>> we are wanting to have a process on our website/server

Kind of an important item to leave out of that first post and now we don't know what your server platform/environment is because you didn't tell us that. If you want good answers you have to ask good questions.

I will tackle two environments
(A) Windows/IIS - With MS Word installed on the server you can use the COM interfaces to the MS Word Object Model to obtain information from documents.

(B) Windows or Unix/Java Web Server - Apache POI is native Java objects that can read/write MS Word documents and other MS Office files. I don't know which ones other than Excel.

In both cases i don't know if they will provide you with a solution to your complete requirements.

-pete

 

[sethu27]

hi,

Based on styles, word documents(say .rtf or .doc) can be converted into XML files using VBA programming.

 

[WestSide2003]

Hi,

Yes, we are using IIS, Windows 2000 Server edition

Basically we want to convert a word document to xml.

I have word installed on the server as of now.....

I am unclear on the path to take if I wanted to convert our word docs to xml format.

We have 1000 plus docs and are looking for a way to have it automated, not just for those 1000 docs, but for all future word documents uploaded to our server...

HTH

-WestSide