Question

At work, I have two Word documents that represent differing versions of the same documents. I want to compare and extract the differences and I think I want to convert the word document to a text file and then diff it. Is this possible? Thanks.

Answer 1

If you have Word installed in the system, you might use the activeX Word automation object to extract the text. Use this simple, non-tested, code to get you started

word = WIN32OLE.new('Word.Application');
worddoc = word.Documents.Open(filename);
text = worddoc.content.text;

If you don’t have Word or don’t want to require your users to have Word installed, then you might as well extract the text with a little more effort. The recent .docx format that word uses, is nothing more than Open XML Office files in a zip archive. So, you just need to unzip the .docx file, search in the word folder for the xml file representing the document contents; and extract the text simply by parsing the XML (DOM or SAX or PORO or ..).