Question

I need to extract formatted text snippets of a Word document and store it inside an SQL Server table, for later processing and then reinsertion in the Word document using C#.

I’ve had a look at the Word DOM and it seems that I need to use a combination of the Document.Load(), Document.Save() and Range.Copy(), Range.Paste() methods to create a file for each snippets that I then load into the DB.

Isn’t there a easier (more efficient way)?

By the way the code snippets can be hidden text and I was thinking about storing the snippets as RTF.

Answer 1

Finally I got to use Aspose.Words for .NET to extract the code snippets from the Word file I’m interested in and store them as RTF:

// Get insteresting code snippets (in this case text runs with 
// style "tw4winMark")
Document sourceDocument = new Document(fileName);
var runs = sourceDocument.GetChildNodes(NodeType.Run, true)
    .Select(r => r.Font.StyleName == "tw4winMark").ToList();

// Store snippets into temporary document
// Read Aspose documentation for details
Document document = new Document();
if (runs.Count > 0) {
    NodeImporter nodeImporter = new NodeImporter(
        runs[0].Document,
        document,
        ImportFormatMode.KeepSourceFormatting
    );

    foreach (Run run in runs) {
        Run importedRun = nodeImporter.ImportNode(run, true) as Run;
        importedRun.Font.Hidden = false;
        document.Sections[0].Body.Paragraphs[0].AppendChild(importedRun);
    }
}

// save temporary document in MemoryStream as RTF
RtfSaveOptions saveOptions = new RtfSaveOptions();
MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream();
document.Save(ms, saveOptions);

// retrieve RTF from MemoryStream
ms.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(ms);
string rtf = sr.ReadToEnd();

One can then store the rtf into a text field of the database as usual and edit it in a RTF text control.