Output in MS Word

[thendal]

Hi All, I have a M$ word document (letter.doc) stored in /usr/local/apache/cgi-bin/letter.doc

I wrote a perl code in which each time user inputs some value like name, address the output word document customize according to the input.

the letter.doc looks like this
----------------------------
in(today)

in(address)

Dear in(name),
Blabal ablan blah blah blah


Thank you
------------------------------

i replace in(today),in(address) ,in(name) with values using the following code.

when i try run the script in web brower /usr/local/apache/cgi-bin/test_letter.pl

it fires up word application .But its not outputting any content what am i doing wrong here ...

#!/usr/bin/perl
use CGI;
$op=new CGI;

$in{name}="My Name is"
$in{address}=" address";
$in{today}="23/03/05";

&out("letter.doc");

   sub out
     {
     
       print "Content-type: application/msword", "\n\n";
       local($file)=@_;
       open(OUT,"$file") || print "$!: $file <br>";
       while(<OUT>)
       {
         $_ =~ s/in\((\w+)\)/$in{$1}/g;
         print;
       }
       close OUT;
     }

Thank you for any insight

 

[mlibeson]

It looks like you are opening word and writing to a file named letter.doc

There is no use of OLE to communicate to MS word that you want to open letter.doc in the application.

I have not done this myself, but I am pretty sure you need to use an OLE module of some sort.

Search the PERL forum for word application and you might find some helpful hints.


Michael Libeson

 

[thendal]

Thanks Mike,

Actually i am not creating word document.
I am placing word document file letter.doc file and replacing dynamic variables in it like in(name) in(address) etc ..I assume on the server end it act as a raw text file. If i view letter.doc as a text file. I can see all the variable are replaced by approriate values.

Another problem is how to present the word document in cgi-bin directory to browser for viewing.

May be i am missing something here ..as you said may be i need a OLE to communicate.

 

[wraheem]

You will want to do something like this:

#!perl

use Win32::OLE;

my $today = "whatever";
my $address = "whatever";
my $name = "whatever";

my $_app_object = (Win32::OLE->GetActiveObject('Word.Application') ||
                   Win32::OLE->new('Word.Application'));

$_app_object->Selection->TypeText({Text => 'In' "$today"});
$_app_object->Selection->TypeParagraph();
$_app_object->Selection->TypeParagraph();
$_app_object->Selection->TypeText({Text => 'in'"$address"});
$_app_object->Selection->TypeParagraph();
$_app_object->Selection->TypeParagraph();
$_app_object->Selection->TypeText({Text => 'Dear in' "$name" ';'});
$_app_object->Selection->TypeParagraph();
$_app_object->Selection->TypeParagraph();
$_app_object->Selection->TypeText({Text => 'blah blah blah'});
$_app_object->Selection->TypeParagraph();
$_app_object->Selection->TypeParagraph();
$_app_object->Selection->TypeText({Text => 'Thank you.'});

If what you want to do is in fact create a word document on the fly.

But I'm not sure excatly if that's what you want to do after reading your second post.

HTH

 

[thendal]

Thanks Wraheem, This works in *nix?

 

[wraheem]

99.9% sure the answer is nope. But there should be a way to create a document under the same type way using whatever word processing app in whatever flavor of *nix your using (ie OpenOffice).