Cookbook

Recently I was writing a sMash application where I needed to extract the text from Microsoft Word format .doc and Powerpoint .ppt files. The text was then going to be indexed using Apache Lucene but that is another story. I am not aware of a way to do this using standard PHP so I looked to the Java world. I found that using the sebring Java Bridge with Apache POI I could do this in just a few lines of PHP.

I thought I’d share the code. Here is what I did:

1. Download Apache POI. I used the latest development stream code from here: http://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi/poi/
   I used the code from the dev/bin branch and dowloaded poi-bin-3.5-beta4-20081128.zip .

2. From this zip I extracted the three jars I needed where were

   	poi-3.5-beta4-20081128.jar
           poi-contrib-3.5-beta4-20081128.jar
           poi-scratchpad-3.5-beta4-20081128.jar
   

   I placed these three jars into the /lib directory of my sMash application.
   EDIT Michael pointed out that this JARS are actually available in Maven so I could have pulled them in from there.

3. I added a dependency for zero.php to config/ivy.xml

4. I created public/wordExtract.php with the following contents:

   <?php
    
   // Demonstrate the use of POI HWPF to extract text from a ms-word format file. 
   // Note that there are other methods of WordExtractor that can be used to iterate through paragraphs
    
   java_import("org.apache.poi.hwpf.extractor.WordExtractor");
   $fs= new Java ("java.io.FileInputStream","c:/temp/poitest.doc");
   $we = new WordExtractor($fs);
   $text=$we->getText();
   echo $text;

5. I created public/powerpointExtract.php with the following contents:

   <?php
    
   // Demonstrate the use of POI HSLF to extract text from a powerpoint format file. 
    
    
   java_import("org.apache.poi.hslf.HSLFSlideShow");
   java_import("org.apache.poi.hslf.usermodel.SlideShow");
    
   $fs= new Java ("java.io.FileInputStream","c:/temp/poitest.ppt");
   $hsss=new HSLFSlideShow($fs);
   $ss= new SlideShow($hsss);
   foreach ($ss->getSlides() as $slide) {
       echo $slide->getTitle();
       echo "<br><br>";
       foreach ( $slide->getTextRuns() as $textRun) {
       	echo $textRun->getRawText();
       echo "<br>" ;   	
       }
   }

6. I tested this code with a number of real world powerpoint and word documents that I had.