Extract tables from Microsoft Office Word documents Leave feedback
To extract tables from Microsoft Office Word document getStructure method is used. This method returns XML representation of the document. Tables are represented by “table” tag. For more details, see Extract text structure.
WarninggetStructure 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 tables 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 tables from Microsoft Office Word document:
// Create an instance of Parser class
try (Parser parser = new Parser(Constants.SampleDocx)) {
// 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();
// Iterate over the child nodes
for (int i = 0; i < nodes.getLength(); i++) {
Node n = nodes.item(i);
// If it's a table
if (n.getNodeName().toLowerCase() == "table") {
System.out.println("table");
// Process node
processNode(n);
}
readNode(n);
}
}
private static void processNode(Node node) {
NodeList nodes = node.getChildNodes();
// Iterate over the child nodes
for (int i = 0; i < nodes.getLength(); i++) {
Node n = nodes.item(i);
switch (n.getNodeName().toLowerCase()) {
// In the case of a row or cell
case "tr":
case "td": {
// Print the name
System.out.println(n.getNodeName());
// Process sub-nodes
processNode(n);
System.out.println();
System.out.println("/" + n.getNodeName());
break;
}
default:
// Print the node value (if it's not null)
String value = n.getNodeValue();
if(value != null) {
System.out.print(value);
}
processNode(n);
break;
}
}
}
You may easily run the code above and see the feature in action in our GitHub examples:
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