Extract metadata from Microsoft Office Word documents

To extract metadata from Microsoft Office Word documents GetMetadata method is used. This method allows to extract the following metadata:

Name	Description
title	The title of the document.
subject	The subject of the document.
keywords	The keyword of the document.
comments	The comments of the document.
content-status	The content status of the document.
category	The category of the document.
company	The company of the document.
manager	The manager of the document.
author	The name of the document’s author.
last-author	The name of the last document’s author.
hyperlink-base	The base string used for evaluating relative hyperlinks in this document.
application	The name of the application.
application-version	The version number of the application that created the document.
template	The informational name of the document template.
created-time	The time of the document creation.
last-saved-time	The time of the the document when it was last saved.
last-printed-time	The time of the document when it was last printed.
revision-number	The document revision number.
total-editing-time	The total editing time in minutes.

Here are the steps to extract metadata from Microsoft Office Word document:

Instantiate Parser object for the initial document;
Call GetMetadata method and obtain collection of document metadata objects;
Iterate through the collection and get metadata names and values.

GetMetadata method returns null value if metadata extraction isn’t supported for the document. For example, metadata extraction isn’t supported for Zip archive. Therefore, for Zip archive GetMetadata method returns null. If Microsoft Office Word document has no metadata, GetMetadata method returns an empty collection.

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

// Create an instance of Parser class
using(Parser parser = new Parser(filePath))
{
    // Extract metadata from the document
    IEnumerable<MetadataItem> metadata = parser.GetMetadata();
    // Iterate over metadata items
    foreach(MetadataItem item in metadata)
    {
        // Print the item name and value
        Console.WriteLine(string.Format("{0}: {1}", item.Name, item.Value));
    }
}

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GitHub examples

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