Creating Word Files with PHP

lajkonik86

I need to put variables into a word file. Is it possible to do this with php? And how do I go about doing so?

dalecosp

Disclaimer: I could care less about Word, and don't know much about it. There may be some PHP functions I don't know about. However, here's a scenario.

You have a template Word file ... you put unique strings into the raw source of the template, and use str_replace or somesuch to put your variables in. Bingo!

HTH,

Drakla

dalecosp wrote:
You have a template Word file ... you put unique strings into the raw source of the template, and use str_replace or somesuch to put your variables in. Bingo!

HTH,

It doesn't work with Word, doing that - it works fine with RTFs if you strip out all of the line breaks when you load it up, but Word has some evil thing going on inside that spoils any php tomfoolery.

You can get pretty much all the way there with RTFs anyway.

lajkonik86

really need to use word

Drakla

And loading / saving an RTF via word wouldn't be enough? Explain more this problem, boyo.

dalecosp

Hmm, indeed. IIRC, you can take an RTF file and call it foo.doc and Word won't care.

unreal128

It really depends on what version of Word you want to write to. Here is a link you could check to get a start on this. Looks like you can intelligently edit Word documents use COM functions. The sticking point though is that the server needs to recognize the PHP functions as well.

http://builder.com.com/5100-31-5077752.html

lajkonik86

The original app i'm basing this on is using .doc files.
For the sake of keeping the changes smoothly I rather not change anything.

Thing is i'm opening a normal word file so what's the point in changing it to a rtf?

unreal128

They had suggested changing it to rich text because it would make it alot easier to replace/find strings since there aren't any special characters to deal with. To get an idea of this, try opening the word document in notepad. There are special functions that you need to use to display and read non-ASCI character sets like § and ╫ . That is why I was suggesting use PHP COM functions since these would be able to intelligently open and edit Word documents for you.

justsomeone

It may be going back a few versions of Word (Office 2000, I think) but I was certainly able to do a str_replace on a Word doc in the past. I just had a few tags in the document - such as ##AUTHOR_NAME##. I could then read the tagged document into memory, str_replace the tags with actual values, and save under a new name.

So long as the replacement text was around the same size as the tag, and didn't change the number of lines in the document it all worked fine.

I've also been reduced to doing the same thing with postscript files.

cahva

Yeah used that string replace few years back myself. Then turned it to RTF later for better modifications. Then started to use Openoffice and RTF's dont work in some cases very well with it, so nowdays using openoffice's XML-format which is very nice.

Never found a good way to create word-documents. To do that you really need a Windows server and use COM functions IMHO.