[thelist] programming question

Sam-I-Am sam at sam-i-am.com
Fri May 14 09:59:49 CDT 2004


ActiveState maintain a popular perl for win32 build, that ships with 
lots of goodies for scripting in a win32 environment. You can talk to 
activeX objects, COM etc.
In their Perl Developers Kit, they have a tool called perlapp that will 
build an executable from your script, including perl and any modules or 
other depenancies... so your end uses just use it as any other .exe. - 
on the command-line, or droplet-style (i.e. the users would drag a file 
on the exe and it would spit out it's output where you told it to), or, 
if you build a GUI, like any other windows application.

If the word docs are in Word format, you may need to have your script 
open the file in Word and save it out as text of RTF. The Word format is 
notoriously arcane, and I don't know of any native perl modules that 
really handle it well. From RTF, there are modules to parse, extract, do 
whatever you need to do and output wherever or however you need.

This is all very possible, but you have a learning curve ahead of you if 
you've not done this kind of thing before.

Maybe the web server is the best way though - from the point of view of 
quickly getting a familiar interface in front of your users.

hth,
Sam

Diane Soini wrote:

> I'm afraid to ask this, but I need to write some kind of script to read 
> a Word doc (I'll require people to save it as text) and transform the 
> text to xml. But a web server will not be involved. This will need to be 
> done on a Windows network drive. What do I write the script in? It 
> should be easy for people to use. Not a command line program, if 
> possible. My biggest ignorance is that I don't know much about Windows. 
> I usually do UNIX and Mac, and on these I'm just a hack. Can I use perl? 
> Should I make a java applet? Or maybe I should just find a web server at 
> the company I could use and do it that way? Probably easier for me.
> 
> Diane



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