MS Word files and PDFs

ruby-talk
1

Hello,

I'm fairly new to the Ruby scene.
Is there any library that can read MS Word (.doc) files and extract the pure
text...what about libs for PDF files?

Thanks folks,

M.

2

You could use the win32ole library and read them yourself via OLE.

···

On 4/22/06, Mateo Barraza <mateo.barraza@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello,

I'm fairly new to the Ruby scene.
Is there any library that can read MS Word (.doc) files and extract the pure
text...what about libs for PDF files?

Thanks folks,

M.

--
Keith Sader
ksader@gmail.com
http://www.saderfamily.org/roller/page/ksader

3

Hi,

There's not a MS Word library that I know of that will easily allow you
to extract the pure text, but the OLE suggestion is a good idea. Another
method would be to save as WordprocessingML (XML) (if you have Word 2003) and use
either REXML or libxml-ruby (two Ruby XML libraries) to parse it (or XSLT). If you've got XML, the
interesting nodes (if you really only want text) are the 'w:t' ones.

HTH,
Keith

···

On Sun, 23 Apr 2006, Mateo Barraza wrote:

I'm fairly new to the Ruby scene.
Is there any library that can read MS Word (.doc) files and extract the pure
text...what about libs for PDF files?

4

Thanks for your responses; I also found that the POI java project was
extended to support ruby:
http://jakarta.apache.org/poi/poi-ruby.html
Although, I think the win32ole solution is the best for simply
reading the content of the docs...

M

···

On 4/22/06, Keith Fahlgren <keith@oreilly.com> wrote:

On Sun, 23 Apr 2006, Mateo Barraza wrote:
> I'm fairly new to the Ruby scene.
> Is there any library that can read MS Word (.doc) files and extract the
pure
> text...what about libs for PDF files?

Hi,

There's not a MS Word library that I know of that will easily allow you
to extract the pure text, but the OLE suggestion is a good idea. Another
method would be to save as WordprocessingML (XML) (if you have Word 2003)
and use
either REXML or libxml-ruby (two Ruby XML libraries) to parse it (or
XSLT). If you've got XML, the
interesting nodes (if you really only want text) are the 'w:t' ones.

HTH,
Keith

5

Keith Sader wrote:

You could use the win32ole library and read them yourself via OLE.

Hi,

could you provide code snippet

···

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6

I have found this most useful:

what you want should be hidden in there

A most valuable read anyway.

Cheers
Robert

···

On Feb 8, 2008 8:18 AM, Rajesh Soni <rajesh.soni@softwarefolks.com> wrote:

Keith Sader wrote:

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http://ruby-smalltalk.blogspot.com/

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