Extract text from doc and docx

I would like to know how can I read the contents of a doc or docx. I'm using a Linux VPS and PHP, but if there is a simpler solution using other language, please let me know, as long as it works under a linux webserver.

This is a .DOCX solution only. For .DOC or .PDF you'll need to use something else like pdf2text.php for PDF

function docx2text($filename) {
   return readZippedXML($filename, "word/document.xml");
 }

function readZippedXML($archiveFile, $dataFile) {
// Create new ZIP archive
$zip = new ZipArchive;

// Open received archive file
if (true === $zip->open($archiveFile)) {
    // If done, search for the data file in the archive
    if (($index = $zip->locateName($dataFile)) !== false) {
        // If found, read it to the string
        $data = $zip->getFromIndex($index);
        // Close archive file
        $zip->close();
        // Load XML from a string
        // Skip errors and warnings
        $xml = new DOMDocument();
    $xml->loadXML($data, LIBXML_NOENT | LIBXML_XINCLUDE | LIBXML_NOERROR | LIBXML_NOWARNING);
        // Return data without XML formatting tags
        return strip_tags($xml->saveXML());
    }
    $zip->close();
}

// In case of failure return empty string
return "";
}

echo docx2text("test.docx"); // Save this contents to file

Here i have added the solution to get the text from .doc,.docx word files

How to extract text from word file .doc,docx php

For .doc

private function read_doc() {
    $fileHandle = fopen($this->filename, "r");
    $line = @fread($fileHandle, filesize($this->filename));   
    $lines = explode(chr(0x0D),$line);
    $outtext = "";
    foreach($lines as $thisline)
      {
        $pos = strpos($thisline, chr(0x00));
        if (($pos !== FALSE)||(strlen($thisline)==0))
          {
          } else {
            $outtext .= $thisline." ";
          }
      }
     $outtext = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s\,\.\-\n\r\t@\/\_\(\)]/","",$outtext);
    return $outtext;
}

For .docx

private function read_docx(){

        $striped_content = '';
        $content = '';

        $zip = zip_open($this->filename);

        if (!$zip || is_numeric($zip)) return false;

        while ($zip_entry = zip_read($zip)) {

            if (zip_entry_open($zip, $zip_entry) == FALSE) continue;

            if (zip_entry_name($zip_entry) != "word/document.xml") continue;

            $content .= zip_entry_read($zip_entry, zip_entry_filesize($zip_entry));

            zip_entry_close($zip_entry);
        }// end while

        zip_close($zip);

        $content = str_replace('</w:r></w:p></w:tc><w:tc>', " ", $content);
        $content = str_replace('</w:r></w:p>', "\r\n", $content);
        $striped_content = strip_tags($content);

        return $striped_content;
    }

Parse .docx, .odt, .doc and .rtf documents

I wrote a library that parses the docx, odt and rtf documents based on answers here and elsewhere.

The major improvement I have made to the .docx and .odt parsing is the that the library processes the XML that describes the document and attempts to conform it to HTML tags, i.e. em and strong tags. This means that if you're using the library for a CMS, text formatting is not lost

You can get it here