Reading/Writing a MS Word file in PHP

Question

Is it possible to read and write Word (2003 and 2007) files in PHP without using a COM object? I know that I can:

$file = fopen('c:\file.doc', 'w+');
fwrite($file, $text);
fclose();

but Word will read it as an HTML file not a native .doc file.

Answer 1

I don't know about reading native Word documents in PHP, but if you want to write a Word document in PHP, WordprocessingML (aka WordML) might be a good solution. All you have to do is create an XML document in the correct format. I believe Word 2003 and 2007 both support WordML.

Answer 2

Most probably you won't be able to read Word documents without COM.

Writing was covered in this topic

Answer 3

Office 2007 .docx should be possible since it's an XML standard. Word 2003 most likely requires COM to read, even with the standards now published by MS, since those standards are huge. I haven't seen many libraries written to match them yet.

Answer 4

2007 might be a bit complicated as well.

The .docx format is a zip file that contains a few folders with other files in them for formatting and other stuff.

Rename a .docx file to .zip and you'll see what I mean.

So if you can work within zip files in PHP, you should be on the right path.

Answer 5

I don't know what you are going to use it for, but I needed .doc support for search indexing; What I did was use a little commandline tool called "catdoc"; This transfers the contents of the Word document to plain text so it can be indexed. If you need to keep formatting and stuff this is not your tool.

Answer 6

this works with vs < office 2007 and its pure PHP, no COM crap, still trying to figure 2007

<?php



/*****************************************************************
This approach uses detection of NUL (chr(00)) and end line (chr(13))
to decide where the text is:
- divide the file contents up by chr(13)
- reject any slices containing a NUL
- stitch the rest together again
- clean up with a regular expression
*****************************************************************/

function parseWord($userDoc) 
{
    $fileHandle = fopen($userDoc, "r");
    $line = @fread($fileHandle, filesize($userDoc));   
    $lines = explode(chr(0x0D),$line);
    $outtext = "";
    foreach($lines as $thisline)
      {
        $pos = strpos($thisline, chr(0x00));
        if (($pos !== FALSE)||(strlen($thisline)==0))
          {
          } else {
            $outtext .= $thisline." ";
          }
      }
     $outtext = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s\,\.\-\n\r\t@\/\_\(\)]/","",$outtext);
    return $outtext;
} 

$userDoc = "cv.doc";

$text = parseWord($userDoc);
echo $text;


?>

Answer 7

Reading binary Word documents would involve creating a parser according to the published file format specifications for the DOC format. I think this is no real feasible solution.

You could use the Microsoft Office XML formats for reading and writing Word files - this is compatible with the 2003 and 2007 version of Word. For reading you have to ensure that the Word documents are saved in the correct format (it's called Word 2003 XML-Document in Word 2007). For writing you just have to follow the openly available XML schema. I've never used this format for writing out Office documents from PHP, but I'm using it for reading in an Excel worksheet (naturally saved as XML-Spreadsheet 2003) and displaying its data on a web page. As the files are plainly XML data it's no problem to navigate within and figure out how to extract the data you need.

The other option - a Word 2007 only option (if the OpenXML file formats are not installed in your Word 2003) - would be to ressort to OpenXML. As databyss pointed out here the DOCX file format is just a ZIP archive with XML files included. There are a lot of resources on MSDN regarding the OpenXML file format, so you should be able to figure out how to read the data you want. Writing will be much more complicated I think - it just depends on how much time you'll invest.

Perhaps you can have a look at PHPExcel which is a library able to write to Excel 2007 files and read from Excel 2007 files using the OpenXML standard. You could get an idea of the work involved when trying to read and write OpenXML Word documents.

Answer 8

Would the .rtf format work for your purposes? .rtf can easily be converted to and from .doc format, but it is written in plaintext (with control commands embedded). This is how I plan to integrate my application with Word documents.

Answer 9

phpLiveDocx is a Zend Framework component and can read and write DOC and DOCX files in PHP on Linux, Windows and Mac.

See the project web site at:

http://www.phplivedocx.org

Answer 10

You can use Antiword, it is a free MS Word reader for Linux and most popular OS.

$document_file = 'c:\file.doc';
$text_from_doc = shell_exec('/usr/local/bin/antiword '.$document_file);

Answer 11

www.phplivedocx.org is a SOAP based service that means that you always need to be online for testing the Files also does not have enough examples for its use . Strangely I found only after 2 days of downloading (requires additionaly zend framework too) that its a SOAP based program(cursed me !!!)...I think without COM its just not possible on a Linux server and the only idea is to change the doc file in another usable file which PHP can parse...

Answer 12

Hi.. even i'm working on same kind of project [An Onlinw Word Processor]! But i've choosen c#.net and ASP.net. But through the survey i did; i got to know that

By Using Open XML SDK and VSTO [Visual Studio Tools For Office]

we may easily work with a word file manipulate them and even convert internally to different into several formats such as .odt,.pdf,.docx etc..

So, goto msdn.microsoft.com and be thorough about the office development tab. Its the easiest way to do this as all functions we need to implement are already available in .net!!

But as u want to do ur project in PHP, u can do it in Visual Studio and .net as PHP is also one of the .net Compliant Language!!

Answer 13

I have the same case I guess I am going to use a cheap 50 mega windows based hosting with free domain to use it to convert my files on, for PHP server. And linking them is easy. All you need is make an ASP.NET page that recieves the doc file via post and replies it via HTTP so simple CURL would do it.