Search text in Microsoft Office Word documents

To search a keyword in Microsoft Office Word documents search(String) method is used. This method returns the collection of SearchResult objects. For details, see Search Text.

Here are the steps to search a keyword in Microsoft Office Word document:

Instantiate Parser object for the initial document;
Call search(String) method and obtain the collection of SearchResult objects;
Iterate through the collection and get the position and text.

search(String) method returns null value if search isn’t supported for the document. For example, text extraction isn’t supported for Zip archive. Therefore, for Zip archive search(String) method returns null. For empty Microsoft Office Word document search(String) method returns an empty collection.

The following example shows how to find a keyword in Microsoft Office Word document:

// Create an instance of Parser class
try (Parser parser = new Parser(Constants.SampleDocx)) {
    // Search a keyword:
    Iterable<SearchResult> sr = parser.search("nunc");
    // Iterate over search results
    for (SearchResult s : sr) {
        // Print an index and found text:
        System.out.println(String.format("At %d: %s", s.getPosition(), s.getText()));
    }
}

search(String, SearchOptions) method is used for the advanced search in Microsoft Office Word documents - like search with regular expressions, search by pages etc. SearchOptions parameter is used to customize a search.

Search by pages in Microsoft Office Word document page is more resource consuming operation.

Here are the steps to search with a regular expression in Microsoft Office Word document:

Instantiate Parser object for the initial document;
Instantiate SearchOptions object with the parameters for the search;
Call search(String, SearchOptions) method and obtain the collection of SearchResult objects;
Iterate through the collection and get the position and text.

The following example shows how to search with a regular expression in Microsoft Office Word document:

// Create an instance of Parser class
try (Parser parser = new Parser(Constants.SampleDocx)) {
    // Search with a regular expression with case matching
    Iterable<SearchResult> sr = parser.search("(\\sut\\s)", new SearchOptions(true, false, true));
    // Iterate over search results
    for (SearchResult s : sr) {
        // Print an index and found text:
        System.out.println(String.format("At %d: %s", s.getPosition(), s.getText()));
    }
}

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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