{"id":1863,"date":"2015-07-27T15:56:11","date_gmt":"2015-07-27T15:56:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/copyright.lboro.ac.uk\/lorls\/?p=1863"},"modified":"2015-07-27T15:56:11","modified_gmt":"2015-07-27T15:56:11","slug":"word-document-importer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/lorls\/lorls\/word-document-importer","title":{"rendered":"Word document importer"},"content":{"rendered":"

At this year’s Meeting the Reading List Challenge (MTRLC) workshop<\/a>, my boss Gary Brewerton demonstrated one of the features we have in LORLS: the ability to ingest a Word document that contains Harvard(ish) citations. Our script reads in a Office Open XML.docx format<\/a> Word document and spits out some structured data ready to import into a LORLS reading list. \u00a0The idea behind this is that academics still create reading lists in Word, despite us having had an online system for 15 years now. Anything we can do to make getting these Word documents into LORLS easier for them, the more likely it is that we’ll actually get to see the data. We’ve had this feature for a while now, and its one of those bits of code that we revisit every so often when we come across new Word documents that it doesn’t handle as well as we’d like.<\/p>\n

The folk at MTRLC seemed to like it, and Gary suggested that I yank the core of the import code out of LORLS, bash it around a bit and then make it available as a standalone program for people to play with, including sites that don’t use LORLS. \u00a0So that’s what I’ve done – you can download the single script from:<\/p>\n

https:\/\/lorls.lboro.ac.uk\/WordImporter\/WordImporter<\/a><\/p>\n

The code is, as with the rest of LORLS, written in Perl<\/a>. It makes heavy use of regular expression<\/a> pattern matching and Z39.50<\/a> look ups to do its work. \u00a0It is intended to run as a CGI script, so you’ll need to drop it on a machine with a web server. \u00a0It also uses some Perl modules from CPAN<\/a> that you’ll need to make sure are installed:<\/p>\n