[Resolved] Displaying Word documents

davewine

I'm trying to find a way to display word documents on a web page. If anyone uses yahoo mail, yahoo has a program that allows you to view the .doc file in a webpage. I'm wondering how to do this...is it possible to do this with php? I'm quite new to PHP, but my cousin said they're might be a way to do it.

ANY help on this would be very much helpful.

Thanks,

😃ave

ScubaKing22

I searched php.net, the official documentation, and couldn't find anything about displaying Word documents. My guess is that they used some sort of online program, such as a java-applet.

sijis

funny thing is that i was looking at some stuff for using COM and i bumped into something somewhat related to your question.
Although is only a way to create a doc file, you could use it to read one. Here is an example how to create a .doc file
http://us3.php.net/manual/en/class.com.php

but your goal is to read the doc file.
maybe a filesystem function could help
I'm thinking fopen() or fread(). You might be able to find something in the user comments.

here's a list of filesystem functions:
http://us3.php.net/manual/en/ref.filesystem.php

dinger

If you are running on a *NIX OS, it may not be possible to read an MS-Office document via PHP.

I believe the formats for Office documents are proprietary to MS.

I've been trying to figure out how to have PHP parse a word document and dump the contents into my HTML template.

I have yet to figure out how to do it, but I have been told it may not be possible due to the proprietary nature of the MS-Word .doc format.

I do know that it is possible on a Win OS though using ASP or perhaps PHP.

I hope this helps.

Chris

barand

<A href="http://www.domain.com/path/worddoc.doc">Word Document</A>

hth

juschillinnow

will a browser interpret a .doc file?

Maybe I'm going off the deep end here, but if the browser does, could you use an iframe and have the target set for the .doc file so it displays like a .txt file?

barand

will a browser interpret a .doc file?

It certainly works with M$IE

dinger

If you have MS-Word installed the browser will open Word, either as a browser plug-in or separately, depending on how your system is configured.

The browser itself will not and can not interpret a .doc file.

Chris

davewine

Ya, I've done the IFrame, but, you can click anywhere within there and be able to edit the document...i don't think any one could save it though.

I'm now thinking of just doing an iframe, and disabling the mouse buttions in that iframe.

Thanks for all the suggestions

thegraham

i think you need to use a program external to php. for example word2x if you are running *NIX. you are better off just converting your documents to html anyway, but supposing you want to display word documents that get updated you could just have something like this:

//php code
exec("word2x -f html /path/to/word.doc /path/to/word.html");
include("/path/to/word.html");
//end php

im afraid that the word2x for html is not fantastic, but it is a work around. You wont get the document displayed exactly as it was in word. it needs some fiddling. You can of course alter this script to do it dynamically, but be careful whenever you use exec.

you also need to make sure that the webserver has write permissions wherever you decide to create the word documents as html, and read permissions for wherever you choose to store the word files.