search in a word file

Anon

Is it possible to creat a php searchfunction to search for a word in MS Word file under
linux? If it is possible where can I find the function?

Best regards

Said Lakhloufi

Anon

You have two choices:

Treat the msword file as binary data. Use a regular expression. Hope ms hasn't mangled the word so severely that it's unrecognizable.
Run the msword file through a converter, store the results in a temp file, and search the clean data. You will have to do this externally to PHP using exec() or popen(). See http://freshmeat.net/projects/wv/ for the converter.

Anon

Could you give me an exsample of the php-code

Best regards,

Said

Anon

As I said, this is done outside of PHP, so you will have to obtain and install wvware yourself. It's installed on my Mandrake Linux system, but the wvText script is broken, so I have to use wvHtml and then use Lynx to translate the HTML into text. Here is an example that works.

$docfile = "somefile.doc";

$cmd = "bash -c \"wvHtml $docfile | lynx -stdin --dump\" ";

// open a pipe to the command and read the results
$fd = popen($cmd, "r");
$buf = fread($fd, 10000);
pclose($fd);

// now $buf contains a translated version of docfile
// you can search it; here we display it.

echo "<PRE>$buf</PRE>";