From word 2003 to xml

Hi there!

I want to build an application that reads word files and generates xml files with data from the .doc file.

e.g.

.doc file:

Metallica (Ride the Lightning) - 1985, Metal

xml:

Code:

---

<cd>
 <band>Metallica</band>
 <album>Ride the Lightning</album>
 <year>1985</year>
 <genre>Metal</genre>
</cd>

---

I assume i need COM but can't figure out advanced searching like "find all bold text that comes before a bold left parenthesis and ignore whitespace"... (..a (.. to seperate band from album). I think of COM in combination with regex but i don't know where to start from...

Any thoughts/tuts?

You had the right idea. I came up with this:

Code:

---

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word;

namespace WordReader
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Application app = new Application();
            string path = Environment.CurrentDirectory + @"\..\Albums.docx";
            Document doc = app.Documents.Open(path, ReadOnly: true);

            Regex pattern = new Regex(@"^(?<artist>.+) \((?<title>.+)\) - (?<year>.+),(?<genre>.+)");
            List<Album> albums = new List<Album>();
            foreach(Paragraph paragraph in doc.Paragraphs)
            {
                Match match = pattern.Match(paragraph.Range.Text);
                if (match.Success)
                {
                    Album album = new Album();
                    album.Artist = match.Groups["artist"].Value;
                    album.Title = match.Groups["title"].Value;
                    album.Year = match.Groups["year"].Value;
                    album.Genre = match.Groups["genre"].Value;
                    albums.Add(album);
                }
            }

            app.Documents.Close();
            ((_Application)app).Quit();

            foreach (Album album in albums)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Artist: {0}", album.Artist);
                Console.WriteLine("Title: {0}", album.Title);
                Console.WriteLine("Year: {0}", album.Year);
                Console.WriteLine("Genre: {0}", album.Genre);
                Console.WriteLine();
            }
        }

        struct Album
        {
            public string Artist;
            public string Title;
            public string Year;
            public string Genre;
        }
    }
}

---

Output:

Code:

---

Artist: Metallica
Title: Ride the Lightning
Year: 1985
Genre:  Metal

Artist: Metallica
Title: Master of Puppets
Year: 1986
Genre:  Metal

---

This is very helpful, thanks! However the objective is to generate xml files with that data. I also thought of using ms word wildcards as possible alternative to regex, but i think they are not as wide as regex... i'll give it a shot and be back for news...

By the way, i think struct is not available in C#, is it?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lemmyz

However the objective is to generate xml files with that data.

---

Well, it sounded like the part you were having problems with was reading/parsing the content in the .doc file. Generating the XML once you have the fields is trivial.

Quote:

---

By the way, i think struct is not available in C#, is it?

---

Of course it is.

Yep it is... :P...

Actually i'm not satisfied with my approach so far... i've been facing a problem in getting the content of each paragraph (formatting included) of a document, store it in a custom object and then perform regex or wildcard searching to each object...

e.g. in .doc file:

Metallica (Ride the Lightning) - 1985, Metal¶
¶
Megadeth (Rust in Peace) - 1990, Metal¶
¶
Ethereal Blue (Essays in Rhyme on passion & Ethics) - 2010, Prog Death Metal¶


So 3 paragraphs would make 3 Paragraph objects from which i should extract the xml data and generate 3 different xmls.
But it looks harder than i thought..
another thing is that in this document there are 5 paragraphs (that's what paragraphs.count gives) while WdStatistic.wdStatisticParagraphs returns 3 (the ones with text in them.... which is what i need...)

Why are you not using the code I provided? The boldness of the font doesn't matter using the regex pattern I supplied. Doesn't it read the Word doc correctly? Obviously you should change the last foreach() to render XML instead of just output to the console, but the Album list creation should work fine.