How to extract text from MS office documents in C#

Question

I was trying to extract a text(string) from MS Word (.doc, .docx), Excel and Powerpoint using C#. Where can i find a free and simple .Net library to read MS Office documents? I tried to use NPOI but i didn't get a sample about how to use NPOI.

Answer 1

Using PInvokes you can use the IFilter interface (on Windows). The IFilters for many common file types are installed with Windows (you can browse them using this tool. You can just ask the IFilter to return you the text from the file. There are several sets of example code (here is one such example).

Answer 2

If you're looking for asp.net options, the interop won't work unless you install office on the server. Even then, Microsoft says not to do it.

I used Spire.Doc, worked beautifully. Spire.Doc download It even read documents that were really .txt but were saved .doc. They have free and pay versions. You can also get a trial license that removes some warning from documents that you create, but I didn't create any, just searched them so the free version worked like a charm.

Answer 3

A bit late to the party, but nevertheless - nowadays you don't need to download anything - all is already installed with .NET: (just make sure to add references to System.IO.Compression and System.IO.Compression.FileSystem)

using System;
using System.Linq;
using System.Xml.Linq;
using System.Xml.XPath;
using System.Xml;
using System.Text;
using System.IO.Compression;

public static class DocxTextExtractor
{
    public static string Extract(string filename)
    {
        XmlNamespaceManager NsMgr = new XmlNamespaceManager(new NameTable());
        NsMgr.AddNamespace("w", "http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main");

        using (var archive = ZipFile.OpenRead(filename))
        {
            return XDocument
                .Load(archive.GetEntry(@"word/document.xml").Open())
                .XPathSelectElements("//w:p", NsMgr)
                .Aggregate(new StringBuilder(), (sb, p) => p
                    .XPathSelectElements(".//w:t|.//w:tab|.//w:br", NsMgr)
                    .Select(e => { switch (e.Name.LocalName) { case "br": return "\v"; case "tab": return "\t"; } return e.Value; })
                    .Aggregate(sb, (sb1, v) => sb1.Append(v)))
                .ToString();
        }
    }
}

Answer 4

For Microsoft Word 2007 and Microsoft Word 2010 (.docx) files you can use the Open XML SDK. This snippet of code will open a document and return its contents as text. It is especially useful for anyone trying to use regular expressions to parse the contents of a Word document. To use this solution you would need reference DocumentFormat.OpenXml.dll, which is part of the OpenXML SDK.

See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb448854.aspx

 public static string TextFromWord(SPFile file)
    {
        const string wordmlNamespace = "http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main";

        StringBuilder textBuilder = new StringBuilder();
        using (WordprocessingDocument wdDoc = WordprocessingDocument.Open(file.OpenBinaryStream(), false))
        {
            // Manage namespaces to perform XPath queries.  
            NameTable nt = new NameTable();
            XmlNamespaceManager nsManager = new XmlNamespaceManager(nt);
            nsManager.AddNamespace("w", wordmlNamespace);

            // Get the document part from the package.  
            // Load the XML in the document part into an XmlDocument instance.  
            XmlDocument xdoc = new XmlDocument(nt);
            xdoc.Load(wdDoc.MainDocumentPart.GetStream());

            XmlNodeList paragraphNodes = xdoc.SelectNodes("//w:p", nsManager);
            foreach (XmlNode paragraphNode in paragraphNodes)
            {
                XmlNodeList textNodes = paragraphNode.SelectNodes(".//w:t", nsManager);
                foreach (System.Xml.XmlNode textNode in textNodes)
                {
                    textBuilder.Append(textNode.InnerText);
                }
                textBuilder.Append(Environment.NewLine);
            }

        }
        return textBuilder.ToString();
    }

Answer 5

Let me just correct a little bit the answer given by KyleM. I just added processing of two extra nodes, which influence the result: one is responsible for the horizontal tabulation with "\t", other - for the vertical tabulation with "\v". Here is the code:

    public static string ReadAllTextFromDocx(FileInfo fileInfo)
    {
        StringBuilder stringBuilder;
        using(WordprocessingDocument wordprocessingDocument = WordprocessingDocument.Open(dataSourceFileInfo.FullName, false))
        {
            NameTable nameTable = new NameTable();
            XmlNamespaceManager xmlNamespaceManager = new XmlNamespaceManager(nameTable);
            xmlNamespaceManager.AddNamespace("w", "http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main");

            string wordprocessingDocumentText;
            using(StreamReader streamReader = new StreamReader(wordprocessingDocument.MainDocumentPart.GetStream()))
            {
                wordprocessingDocumentText = streamReader.ReadToEnd();
            }

            stringBuilder = new StringBuilder(wordprocessingDocumentText.Length);

            XmlDocument xmlDocument = new XmlDocument(nameTable);
            xmlDocument.LoadXml(wordprocessingDocumentText);

            XmlNodeList paragraphNodes = xmlDocument.SelectNodes("//w:p", xmlNamespaceManager);
            foreach(XmlNode paragraphNode in paragraphNodes)
            {
                XmlNodeList textNodes = paragraphNode.SelectNodes(".//w:t | .//w:tab | .//w:br", xmlNamespaceManager);
                foreach(XmlNode textNode in textNodes)
                {
                    switch(textNode.Name)
                    {
                        case "w:t":
                            stringBuilder.Append(textNode.InnerText);
                            break;

                        case "w:tab":
                            stringBuilder.Append("\t");
                            break;

                        case "w:br":
                            stringBuilder.Append("\v");
                            break;
                    }
                }

                stringBuilder.Append(Environment.NewLine);
            }
        }

        return stringBuilder.ToString();
    }

Answer 6

Use The Microsoft Office Interop. It's free and slick. Here how I pulled all the words from a doc.

    using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word;

   //Create Doc
    string docPath = @"C:\docLocation.doc";
    Application app = new Application();
    Document doc = app.Documents.Open(docPath);

    //Get all words
    string allWords = doc.Content.Text;
    doc.Close();
    app.Quit();

Then do whatever you want with the words.