How to grab text from word (docx) document in C#?

Question

I'm trying to get the plain text from a word document. Specifically, the xpath is giving me trouble. How do you select the tags? Here's the code I have.

public static string TextDump(Package package)
{
    StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();

    XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
    xmlDoc.Load(package.GetPart(new Uri("/word/document.xml", UriKind.Relative)).GetStream());

    foreach (XmlNode node in xmlDoc.SelectNodes("/descendant::w:t"))
    {
        builder.AppendLine(node.InnerText);
    }
    return builder.ToString();
}

Answer 1

Your problem is the XML namespaces. SelectNodes don't know how to translate <w:t/> to the full namespace. Therefore, you need to use the overload, that takes an XmlNamespaceManager as the second argument. I modified your code a bit, and it seems to work:

    public static string TextDump(Package package)
    {
        StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();

        XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
        xmlDoc.Load(package.GetPart(new Uri("/word/document.xml", UriKind.Relative)).GetStream());
        XmlNamespaceManager mgr = new XmlNamespaceManager(xmlDoc.NameTable);
        mgr.AddNamespace("w", "http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/wordprocessingml/2006/main");

        foreach (XmlNode node in xmlDoc.SelectNodes("/descendant::w:t", mgr))
        {
            builder.AppendLine(node.InnerText);
        }
        return builder.ToString();
    }

Answer 2

Take a look at the Open XML Format SDK 2.0. There some examples on how to process documents, like this.

Although I have not used it, there is this Open Office XML C# Library that you can take a look at as well.