A while back I came accross a situation where I have to read .doc and .docx file in php. I could not use the file function from php so I did the little googling and found few functions to do that which I want to share over here.

Since .doc and .docx file are not plain text. It cannot be read in php using the function file_get_contents() or file().

.doc file are basically Microsoft Word Binary File Format. Binary DOC files often contain more text formatting information. The function below takes the filename as a parameter and returns the content of the .doc file.

function read_doc_file($filename) {
     if(file_exists($filename))
    {
        if(($fh = fopen($filename, 'r')) !== false ) 
        {
           $headers = fread($fh, 0xA00);

           // 1 = (ord(n)*1) ; Document has from 0 to 255 characters
           $n1 = ( ord($headers[0x21C]) - 1 );

           // 1 = ((ord(n)-8)*256) ; Document has from 256 to 63743 characters
           $n2 = ( ( ord($headers[0x21D]) - 8 ) * 256 );

           // 1 = ((ord(n)*256)*256) ; Document has from 63744 to 16775423 characters
           $n3 = ( ( ord($headers[0x21E]) * 256 ) * 256 );

           // 1 = (((ord(n)*256)*256)*256) ; Document has from 16775424 to 4294965504 characters
           $n4 = ( ( ( ord($headers[0x21F]) * 256 ) * 256 ) * 256 );

           // Total length of text in the document
           $textLength = ($n1 + $n2 + $n3 + $n4);

           $extracted_plaintext = fread($fh, $textLength);

            // if you want to see your paragraphs in a new line, do this
           return nl2br($extracted_plaintext);
           // need more spacing after each paragraph use another nl2br
        }
    }   
    }