Hi
I am building an application where the input files are microsoft word documents. the documents are generally texts with formatting like bold/italic. there are no tables or images in the documents. i want to read the contents of the word file using a java class. i have written a program that reads one byte at a time and outputs if it is a readable character ASCII 32 to 127.
the text of the document is fine but there is a lot of garbage before the beginning and after the actual text. how can i get rid of this garbage text and extract the actual readable text from the Word document.
Thanks in advance

You could convert the word documents by running the "wvText" program from you java-program (wc = Word View). Or read the sources of the program, if you want to do it java-only.

There's a whole family of wv... tools: wvLatex, wvCleanLatex, wvRTF, wvPDF, .... Chances are good they are already included with your distribution (at least Debian). If not get it from http://wvware.sourceforge.net/

thanks a lot .. will try this out

If you want a java only solution, you may have a look at POI:

http://jakarta.apache.org/poi/hwpf/index.html