Find linebreaks in a docx file using PHP

Question

My PHP script successfully reads all text from a .docx file, but I cannot figure out where the line breaks should be so it makes the text bunched up and hard to read (one huge paragraph). I have manually gone over all of the XML files to try and figure it out but I cannot figure it out.

Here are the functions I use to retrieve the file data and return the plain text.

    public function read($FilePath)
{
    // Save name of the file
    parent::SetDocName($FilePath);

    $Data = $this->docx2text($FilePath);

    $Data = str_replace("<", "&lt;", $Data);
    $Data = str_replace(">", "&gt;", $Data);

    $Breaks = array("\r\n", "\n", "\r");
    $Data = str_replace($Breaks, '<br />', $Data);

    $this->Content = $Data;
}

function docx2text($filename) {
    return $this->readZippedXML($filename, "word/document.xml");
}

function readZippedXML($archiveFile, $dataFile)
{
    // Create new ZIP archive
    $zip = new ZipArchive;

    // Open received archive file
    if (true === $zip->open($archiveFile))
    {
        // If done, search for the data file in the archive
        if (($index = $zip->locateName($dataFile)) !== false)
        {
            // If found, read it to the string
            $data = $zip->getFromIndex($index);

            // Close archive file
            $zip->close();

            // Load XML from a string
            // Skip errors and warnings
            $xml = DOMDocument::loadXML($data, LIBXML_NOENT | LIBXML_XINCLUDE | LIBXML_NOERROR | LIBXML_NOWARNING);

            $xmldata = $xml->saveXML();
            //$xmldata = str_replace("</w:t>", "\r\n", $xmldata);
            // Return data without XML formatting tags
            return strip_tags($xmldata);
        }

        $zip->close();
    }

    // In case of failure return empty string
    return "";
} 

Answer 1

It is actually quite a simple answer. All you need to do is add this line in readZippedXML():

$xmldata = str_replace("</w:p>", "\r\n", $xmldata);

This is because </w:p> is what word uses to mark the end of a paragraph. E.g.

<w:p>This is a paragraph.</w:p>
<w:p>And a second one.</w:p>