Read *.xls *.pdf *.doc files.

I have been playing around with reading binary files, but I think I'm going in the wrong direction.

I want to open xls, pdf, doc files and just export the text to a text file.

Any ideas??

-Thx,
Jared.

There are TypeLibraries available specifically for each type of document.

For Ex.

Word - > Word.Document, etc..
Excell - > Excel.Application, Excel.WorkSheet, etc..

For many document related things thoser providers have given us components to automate that. If you like to do it by your own coding by reading binary files then you must be very strong in understanding the formats of each app. I think it might be waste of time. Any how, the R & D will be quite interesting. I too tried a lot and I found some FACT about it. Go ahead & proceed. But don't waste too much time on this.

-Jai

thx for the reply...

i have files on an Intranet... I have built a client side search engine via DHTML and VBScript/JavaScript. The engine works great with text and HTML files, but files that are binary obviously don't return well.

I just want to write an app in VB.Net that will create an index of the text in the file, and dump the other binary data.

I need to figure out the approach of how to open the file and filter any NON ASCII data.

I want to know, how you are opening the file. While opening the file you need to specify the mode as 'Binary'. Can you post the line of your code for opening the file. R U using FileSystemObject or Traditional Open method.?

-Jai.