phpoffice - How do I extract the text content from a word document with PHP?

Solution:

Rather than check each class for text, you can use

                    $sections = $phpWord->getSections();

                    foreach ($sections as $s) {
                        $els = $s->getElements();
                        /** @var ElementTest $e */
                        foreach ($els as $e) {
                            $class = get_class($e);
                            if (method_exists($class, 'getText')) {
                                $text .= $e->getText();
                            } else {
                                $text .= "\n";
                            }
                        }
                    }

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Solution:

You can extract txt from a word document using catdoc http://www.wagner.pp.ru/~vitus/software/catdoc/

It can be installed on Ubuntu using

sudo apt-get install catdoc
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Once you have catdoc working on your system you can call it from php using shell_exec()

<?php

$text = shell_exec('/(fullpath)/catdoc /(fullpath)/word.doc');

print $text;

?>
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Be sure to substitute (fullpath) with the actual path to catdoc and your word doc.

EDIT ---- Addition

If you can save your files as .docx rather than .doc it is a little bit easier. You can use unzip rather than catdoc.

Simply replace:

$text = shell_exec('/(fullpath)/catdoc /(fullpath)/word.doc');
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with

$text = shell_exec("/(fullpath)/unzip -p /(fullpath)/word.docx word/document.xml | sed -e 's/<[^>]\{1,\}>//g; s/[^[:print:]]\{1,\}//g'");
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You could use this same technique with most other command line document to text converters. Just replace the command in the shell_exec() with the command that works on your system. You can check How to extract just plain text from .doc & .docx files? (unix) for other unix/linux alternatives

For other PHP alternatives check out How to extract text from word file .doc,docx,.xlsx,.pptx php