# Trying to read MS word contents using PHP

**URL:** <https://forum.kirupa.com/t/trying-to-read-ms-word-contents-using-php/331086>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Created:** [May 14, 2013, 12:00pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/trying-to-read-ms-word-contents-using-php/331086 "2013-05-14T12:00:54Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![darroosh](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a88e4f/32.png) [@darroosh](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/darroosh)\
**Post date:** [May 14, 2013, 12:00pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/trying-to-read-ms-word-contents-using-php/331086/1 "2013-05-14T12:00:54Z")

</div>

Hi all,

I’m trying to read MS word contents using fread or file\_get\_contents …  
It works fine using both.

But my problem is explained in the attached file.

I want to ignore non English characters because they are always converted into strange chars.

This is my code :

```php
function parseWord($userDoc) {$fileHandle = fopen($userDoc, "r");
$line =mb_convert_encoding( @fread($fileHandle, filesize($userDoc)) , "UTF-8");

$lines = explode(chr(0x0D),$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\,\.\-
\r	@\/\_\(\)]/","",$outtext);return $outtext;} 

```

Can someone help?