How to print a content from a word file

[ranumehul]

Hello All, i am looking for a script to read a content for a word files.

By google, i came to know about this library, i looked in library's samples.

But did not find any example to read and how to print a that word content.

Can any one suggest a script to read a content and how to print that content using This PHPWord library ?

Thanks,
Mehul Prajapati.

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[FBnil]

With "print", do you mean echo or do you mean sending a document to the printer?

If the first, why not try dumping the whole variable?

$phpWord = new Word2007();
$template = $phpWord->load(storage_path('greetings.docx'));
dd($template->getSections()[0]->getelements()[0]->getText());

For example, you will need to loop through all Text and TextRun elements, but also look into table elements and such. See this loop example: #1109

nb: dd() is die and dump, maybe try var_dump() to print it out if you are not using Laravel.

I you really mean print, well, I then suggest installing the commandline version of openoffice, or convert your document to pdf and use the pdf to postscript utilities, then print the postscript.

[FBnil]

@ranumehul Has your question been answered? Have you abandoned the question and it can be closed?

[kaystrobach]

@ranumehul please close issue if solved

[asnyder]

Clearly he's looking to just get the contents and echo or print(), not print to a document. Further, this library advertises itself as being able to read from office documents but to the reporter's point, no documentation actually exists that shows how to load the entire unencoded and readable text into a variable.

This is something that I too thought this library could do, but seems that's not the case, or at least not as easily as $file = ->load('somefile.docx'); echo $file->getText(), which is clearly what everyone wants and needs.

[kaystrobach]

You can do so ...

Use the Reader and the htmlWriter, then stripTgs and you are done.

[younkim]

I spent a little bit of time looking through the library because I have some needs to read docx files myself and just wanted to address @asnyder 's comment about not being able to easily print the content.

From what I see, a docx file isn't as simple as "here's a document file on page 1 with XYZ content, page 2 with ABC", etc. docx files are complex and composed of many nested elements that describe the document. Think of the PHP interpreter that tokenizes the code to be able to parse and execute the strings of characters (code). docx seems kind of like that and a framework in itself, at least how it's implemented in this library.

That's why you can't just grab text you need and print it. It requires looping through the data, analyzing what kind of element you're looking at, and handling how to process it.

Like @kaystrobach said, if you're looking to just print everything in the document, you can load the entire document and use the writer to output the whole thing as HTML (with or without the HTML tags). And yes, you can select and output exactly what you need without the writer, but, as I said, it required looking through the elements and locating it, which isn't necessarily trivial depending on what you're looking to extract.

Edit: turns out docx files are just a bunch of archived XML files.