Extract hyperlinks from Microsoft Office Word documents

To extract hyperlinks from Microsoft Office Word document getStructure method is used. This method returns XML representation of the document. Hyperlinks are represented by “hyperlink” tag; “link” attribute contains hyperlink’s URL. For more details, see Extract text structure. Hyperlink can contain a text:

<hyperlink link="www.google.com">google.com</hyperlink>

getStructure method returns null value if text structure extraction isn’t supported for the document. For example, text structure extraction isn’t supported for TXT files. Therefore, for TXT file getStructure method returns null. If Microsoft Office Word document has no text, getStructure method returns an empty org.w3c.dom.Document object.

Here are the steps to extract hyperlinks from Microsoft Office Word documents:

Instantiate Parser object for the initial document;
Call getStructure method and obtain org.w3c.dom.Document object;
Iterate through the XML document.

The following example demonstrates how to extract hyperlinks from Microsoft Office Word document:

// Create an instance of Parser class
try (Parser parser = new Parser(Constants.SampleHyperlinksDocx)) {
    // Extract text structure to the XML reader
    Document document = parser.getStructure();
    // Read XML document
    readNode(document.getDocumentElement());
}

private static void readNode(Node node) {
    NodeList nodes = node.getChildNodes();
    for (int i = 0; i < nodes.getLength(); i++) {
        Node n = nodes.item(i);
        if (n.getNodeName().toLowerCase() == "hyperlink") {
            Node a = n.getAttributes().getNamedItem("link");
            if (a != null) {
                System.out.println(a.getNodeValue());
            }
        }
        if(n.hasChildNodes()) {
            readNode(n);
        }
    }
}

More resources

GitHub examples

You may easily run the code above and see the feature in action in our GitHub examples:

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