How to Extract Text from Word in C#

Introduction

Usually, the main task in document processing applications, data extraction, or text analysis is text extraction from Word document files. When developing a C# application, developers use libraries such as IronWord that help one work with files in the .docx format and access the text inside of the document instance from it. Using these libraries helps automatize how the content would be retrieved from the Word documents to enable the generation of report production, data mining, or even a document management system.

Using a library such as IronWord one can extract text from any Word document instance; one only needs to load the document object, open paragraphs, or sections, and then retrieve the desired text but still hold its original layout. Such functionality will prove of exceptional utility in the legal, healthcare, and financial fields, where document processing normally falls within the scope of workflows. C# is undoubtedly used to develop extremely scalable and efficient applications that extract text from Word files. Developers can combine it with more extensive systems or applications.

How to Extract Text from Word in C#

1. Install the IronWord library via NuGet in your C# project.
2. Add using IronWord, at the top of your C# file to extract text from Word.
3. Set your license key.
4. Load the existing Word document.
5. Access paragraphs using the paragraph method.
6. Loop through paragraphs and text elements using foreach loops.
7. Extract and display text with Console.

What is IronWord?

IronWord is a strong force in retrieving text and ensures that all kinds of files, such as PDF, Word, txt file etc., are fetched easily. It is designed with precision and speed for quick extraction into the needed text, structured or unstructured while retaining the rest of the document's original format. IronWord is also utilized to provide document analysis, data extraction, and auto-indexing of content.

This supports almost all available file types to ensure smooth integration with applications and is therefore ideal for business automation and high-volume document processing. The scalability of libraries designed in this way will allow easy handling of volumes of documents, which proves to be quite an important asset, especially concerning enterprises working with bulk data extraction.

IronWord is also fully compatible with C# and other programming languages so that it meets the needs of most developers and organizations that look for the smoothest way to streamline their document workflows.

Features of IronWord

Support of Multiple Document Formats

IronWord accepts files in a wide range of document formats. These include:

• PDFs: It may interpret text on both PDFs with ordinary text, PDFs with embedded fonts, and those based on vectors.
• Microsoft Word Files (DOCX): It reads text from Word easily while keeping the document structure and formatting intact.
• Text Files (TXT file): In addition to all of the above formats, IronWord is even able to process plain text files and extract and process text from unformatted, simple text.

Accurate text extraction

The IronWord extraction engine is a capable and sure shot in extracting text content matter if it's buried inside complex documents with page layouts that are equally sophisticated, embedded fonts, or a mix of contents like pictures and tables, etc. The library preserves:

• Text formatting: Bold, italics, underlines, and any other stylistic aspect applied to the text.
• Document Hierarchy: Headers, paragraphs, and lists to place things into perspective and readability.

Handling Structured and Un-structured Data

IronWord is proficient in handling structured and unstructured data. It will extract:

• Structured Data: The documents that contain predictable patterns in formatting, such as the forms and contracts.
• Unstructured Data: In case of unpredictable text layout, reports, or articles.

It has proven to be one of the most useful tools in data mining, information retrieval, and classification tasks because it can process a wide variety of content.

Scalability for Big Volumes

IronWord is built to process document volumes quite effortlessly with great scalability concerning enterprise applications. That means that for instance, this will work with enormous numbers of documents efficiently in the following streams:

• Batching of documents: It is processing many documents at once.
• Heavy files: It does not decay when the size of the documents is huge.

Seamless Integration with Programming Languages

IronWord can seamlessly integrate into development environments, especially Python through easy APIs that developers can add to their workflows without a hassle. It enables:

• Importing IronWord into Python applications: Developers can use the functions within Python scripts directly, for executions without a hiccup.
• Cross-language interoperability: Besides being awesome for Python usage, IronWord is just as awesome for other languages, and therefore is a great inter-language change across different tech stacks.

This ease of integration reduces the time and effort spent in development activities to focus more on functionality than on infrastructure.

High Performance and Speed

The IronWord has performance tuning, and there is an improvement in the text extraction speed of large documents. This may be very important in several real-time applications that require fast execution to read text out. The library can:

• Handle multithreading: This enhances the extraction processes, which are operations running concurrently.
• Small Memory Footprint: This ensures optimal usage of the system resources at the processing time so that it can scale up for very large datasets.

OCR Support Optional

The document contains images. IronWord may be used in conjunction with OCR technologies to avail the reader the following:

• Scanned documents: Pull text out of images, PDFs scanned, or any other format that involves images.
• Multilingual support: Be able to recognize and print text in supported OCR languages.

Metadata preservation

Text isn't all that IronWord extracts. In addition, it preserves metadata from the document, such as:

• Document versioning and any other information useful for compliance or archival purposes.
• This is very helpful in a document management system whose metadata serves to be as important as the content.

Creating a New Project in Visual Studio

To launch the Visual Studio application, choose File from the File menu. Once you have chosen "New Project," select "Console App."

Now enter the name of the .NET project in the given text field after selecting the place for and save the file. Then, as you can see in the following example, click on the Create button and select the required .NET Framework.

The structure of the Visual Studio project will vary based on the selected application. To implement or run the application and input the code, visit the Program.cs file. You could use either the Console, Windows, or Online application.

The code can then be tested and the library added.

Install IronWord library

Utilizing the Visual Studio Tool From the Tools Menu, choose NuGet Package Manager. To view the package management terminal console, navigate to the Package Manager interface.

Install-Package Ironword

Install-Package Ironword

'INSTANT VB TODO TASK: The following line uses invalid syntax:
'Install-Package Ironword

The package can now be used for extracting text in the ongoing project when it has been downloaded and installed.

Another tactic is to use the Package Manager method. Installing directly into the solution is possible with Visual Studio's NuGet Package Manager option. The following graphic illustrates how to access the Package Manager.

To locate packages, use the search field on the NuGet website. All you have to do is look up "Ironword" using the package manager, as the screenshot below illustrates.

The accompanying graphic shows a list of related search results. Please make these adjustments so the software can be installed on your computer.

Extract text from Word Document

To extract text from a document using IronWord, follow the following steps. The code example below is used to describe how to extract the text from a Word document (.docx) by using the IronWord library in C#.

using IronWord;
IronWord.License.LicenseKey = "Licence key here";
var docx1 = new WordDocument("D:\\C# Projects\\ConsoleApp\\ConsoleApp\\File\\existing.docx");
var paragrapbobj = docx1.Paragraphs;
for (int i = 0; i < paragrapbobj.Count; i++)
{
    for(int j=0;j< paragrapbobj[i].Texts.Count; j++)
    {
   Console.WriteLine(paragrapbobj[i].Texts[j].Text.ToString());
    }
}
Console.ReadKey();

using IronWord;
IronWord.License.LicenseKey = "Licence key here";
var docx1 = new WordDocument("D:\\C# Projects\\ConsoleApp\\ConsoleApp\\File\\existing.docx");
var paragrapbobj = docx1.Paragraphs;
for (int i = 0; i < paragrapbobj.Count; i++)
{
    for(int j=0;j< paragrapbobj[i].Texts.Count; j++)
    {
   Console.WriteLine(paragrapbobj[i].Texts[j].Text.ToString());
    }
}
Console.ReadKey();

Imports IronWord
IronWord.License.LicenseKey = "Licence key here"
Dim docx1 = New WordDocument("D:\C# Projects\ConsoleApp\ConsoleApp\File\existing.docx")
Dim paragrapbobj = docx1.Paragraphs
For i As Integer = 0 To paragrapbobj.Count - 1
	Dim j As Integer=0
	Do While j< paragrapbobj(i).Texts.Count
   Console.WriteLine(paragrapbobj(i).Texts(j).Text.ToString())
		j += 1
	Loop
Next i
Console.ReadKey()

Initializes the license key for IronWord, in this example setting it as an empty string or possibly a trial version. Opens up a document located at that path that already exists as a .docx format by instantiating a Word document object. Once the new document itself has loaded, the code accesses all paragraphs contained within the file by using the DOCX or doc.Paragraphs property.

It uses a nested loop for the iterative process of these paragraphs and their text elements. The outer loop makes rounds through every paragraph, and then the inner loop drifts down into the text elements contained within one of the paragraphs. It grabs every piece of text by ripping up all the pieces of text into smaller ones if formatting differs and converts it into a string. Afterward, it prints out the extracted text to the console.

Finally, Console.ReadKey() is called to suspend the program until user input occurs while closing the application window, thus allowing the output to display on the screen before closing the application console window. This is how the contents of a Word document can be pulled and printed in an orderly fashion.

Conclusion

IronWord is a very flexible and efficient text extraction tool for usage on virtually any document format, although very apt for those using Word documents. Its easy API, besides structured text extraction capabilities, makes it a developer-friendly solution that can definitely be counted upon when documents need to have their contents retrieved automatically. Thus, it can maintain formatting while working through rather complex documents, making it very useful for several applications - legal document processing, enterprise-level content management, etc. Therefore, by simply implementing IronWord in your workflow, you will make most tasks related to document analysis, data extraction, and processing considerably easier, and it will help you improve the productivity and accuracy of handling massive volumes of text.

There is a starting price for IronWord at $599. Users can also pay a one-time subscription fee for one year in exchange for technical support and software updates. IronWord comes for a fee that prohibits free distribution. Please refer to the license page of IronWord for more specific details on pricing. Learn more about other products by Iron Software by visiting the products page.