Extract text from Microsoft Office Word documents

To extract a text from Microsoft Office Word documents GetText and GetText(pageIndex) methods are used. These methods allow to extract a text from the entire document or a text from the selected page. TextOptions parameter is ignored for Microsoft Office Words documents.

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

Instantiate Parser object for the initial document;
Call GetText method and obtain TextReader object;
Read a text from reader.

GetText method returns null value if text extraction isn’t supported for the document. For example, text extraction isn’t supported for Zip archive. Therefore, for Zip archive GetText method returns null. For empty Microsoft Office Word document GetText method returns an empty TextReader object (reader.ReadToEnd method returns an empty string).

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

// Create an instance of Parser class
using(Parser parser = new Parser(filePath))
{
    // Extract a text into the reader
    using(TextReader reader = parser.GetText())
    {
        // Print a text from the document
        Console.WriteLine(reader.ReadToEnd());
    }
}

Here are the steps to extract a text from the page of Microsoft Office Word document:

Instantiate Parser object for the initial document;
Call GetDocumentInfo method and obtain IDocumentInfo object with page count;
Call GetText(pageIndex) method with the page index and obtain TextReader object;
Read a text from reader.

Text extraction from Microsoft Office Word document page is more resource consuming operation. Use text extraction from the entire document where it is applicable.

The following example demonstrates how to extract a text from the page of Microsoft Office Word document:

// Create an instance of Parser class
using(Parser parser = new Parser(filePath))
{
    // Get the document info
    IDocumentInfo documentInfo = parser.GetDocumentInfo();
  
    // Iterate over pages
    for(int p = 0; p < documentInfo.PageCount; p++)
    {
        // Print a page number 
        Console.WriteLine(string.Format("Page {0}/{1}", p + 1, documentInfo.PageCount));
  
        // Extract a text into the reader
        using(TextReader reader = parser.GetText(p))
        {
            // Print a text from the document
            Console.WriteLine(reader.ReadToEnd());
        }
    }
}

GroupDocs.Parser also allows to extract a text from Microsoft Office Word documents as HTML, Markdown and formatted plain text. For more details, see Extract Formatted Text.

Here are the steps to extract a text from Microsoft Office Word document as HTML:

Instantiate Parser object for the initial document;
Call GetFormattedText method and obtain TextReader object;
Read a text from reader.

The following example shows how to extract a text from Microsoft Office Word document as HTML:

// Create an instance of Parser class
using (Parser parser = new Parser(filePath))
{
    // Extract a formatted text into the reader
    using (TextReader reader = parser.GetFormattedText(new FormattedTextOptions(FormattedTextMode.Html)))
    {
        // Print a formatted text from the document
        Console.WriteLine(reader.ReadToEnd());
    }
}

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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