I really appreciate all of the discussion on this topic and the many great ideas. I have taken each suggestion and dug into it in depth.
Are there any issues if I just do a rename of the word doc from file.doc to file.txt, then open the file as a text document and parse if for the data I need? I know that the Word document format is not in strait ASCII text, but it appears that the data itself is. I've opened the file and there's a lot of garbage here from Word, but the data I need is just sitting there as text. I wrote a simple parser to read the file and remove the extra characters that would cause problems... mainly chr(0), as it seems to be interpreted by the stream reader as an end-of-file character, but reading it like this seems to work file. I'm reading for tags such as firstname:, lastname:, etc. They are all there and I really could care less about all of the Word stuff in the document. I just need the textual data. Does anyone see any problems with this approach? Just read it as a .TXT file and pull out the data. Jon =================================== This list is hosted by DevelopMentor® http://www.develop.com View archives and manage your subscription(s) at http://discuss.develop.com
