Text

Extracting plain text from Office Open XML DOCX and DOC files is required in many different applications. Whether you are indexing text for a search engine, an AI-powered text analytics tool, or a text-to-speech system, you need to extract text from DOCX and DOC files. In this article, we will show you how to extract plain text from DOCX and DOC files using C#.

TX Text Control provides a very powerful API to extract text from DOCX and DOC files. You can convert the entire document or just a specific range of pages or text between two specific text positions. The following code shows how to extract plain text from a DOCX file using TX Text Control:

Preparing the Application

A .NET 6 console application is created for the purposes of this demo.

Prerequisites The following tutorial requires a trial version of TX Text Control .NET Server.

Download Trial Version

In Visual Studio, create a new Console App using .NET 8.

In the Solution Explorer , select your created project and choose Manage NuGet Packages... from the Project main menu.

Select Text Control Offline Packages from the Package source drop-down.

Install the latest versions of the following package:

TXTextControl.TextControl.ASP.SDK

Extracting Text from DOCX Files

After installing the required NuGet package, you can use the following code to extract plain text from a DOCX file:

try { using TXTextControl.ServerTextControl tx = new TXTextControl.ServerTextControl(); tx.Create(); tx.Load("document.docx", TXTextControl.StreamType.WordprocessingML); tx.Save(out string plainText, TXTextControl.StringStreamType.PlainText);

Console.WriteLine(plainText); } catch (Exception ex) { Console.WriteLine($"An error occurred: {ex.Message}"); } The code snippet above loads a DOCX file and extracts the complete plain text from the document. The extracted text is then written to the console.

Extracting Text Between Headings

TX Text Control provides a powerful API to extract text between two specific text positions. Consider a scenario where you want to get all the text sections between chapter titles that are defined by stylesheets.

Consider the following document:

We want to extract the complete text between the headings with the stylesheet names Heading1 . The following code shows how to extract the text between these two headings:

List ExtractTextBlocks(string paragraphStyleName, ServerTextControl serverTextControl, bool includeRemainingText) { List textBlocks = new List (); bool capturing = false; StringBuilder currentBlock = new StringBuilder();

for (int i = 1; i < serverTextControl.Paragraphs.Count - 1; i++) { Paragraph paragraph = serverTextControl.Paragraphs[i];

if (paragraph.FormattingStyle == paragraphStyleName) { if (capturing) { textBlocks.Add(currentBlock.ToString().Trim()); currentBlock.Clear(); } else { capturing = true; } } else if (capturing) { currentBlock.AppendLine(paragraph.Text); } }

// Add remaining text if still capturing at the end if (includeRemainingText && (capturing || currentBlock.Length > 0)) { textBlocks.Add(currentBlock.ToString().Trim()); }

return textBlocks; } The code snippet below loads a DOCX file and extracts the text between two specified headings. It then prints the extracted text to the console.

using TXTextControl.ServerTextControl tx = new TXTextControl.ServerTextControl(); tx.Create(); tx.Load("document.docx", TXTextControl.StreamType.WordprocessingML);

var test = ExtractTextBlocks("Heading 1", tx, true);

foreach (var item in test) { Console.WriteLine("New block: \r\n\r\n" + item + "\r\n"); } The result is a list of three items containing the text between all headings named Heading 1 .

New block:

This is the text of heading 1.

This is more text of heading 1.

This is the text of heading 1.

Sub-Heading 1

Normal text.

Normal text 2.

Sub-Heading 2

New block:

This is the text of heading 2.

This is more text of heading 2.

New block:

This is the text of heading 3. If we now want to extract only the text between the Heading 2 styles, without adding the rest of the text that doesn't contain a closing style name, we can use the following code:

using TXTextControl.ServerTextControl tx = new TXTextControl.ServerTextControl(); tx.Create(); tx.Load("document.docx", TXTextControl.StreamType.WordprocessingML);

var test = ExtractTextBlocks("Heading 2", tx, false);

foreach (var item in test) { Console.WriteLine("New block: \r\n\r\n" + item + "\r\n"); } The following screenshot shows the extracted text between the Heading 2 styles:

The result of the above code snippet is a block of text between the Heading 2 styles.

New block:

Normal text.

Normal text 2. Conclusion

TX Text Control provides a powerful API to extract text from DOCX and DOC files. You can extract the complete text or just a specific range of text between two specific text positions. This article showed how to extract plain text from DOCX and DOC files using TX Text Control in C#.

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Getting Started

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Company

Contact

Newsletter

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