Opening word documents in vb

I've got some corrupted files, RTF (rich text format) ones that were saved as .doc. In my Vb project I need to make sure that a .doc file really is a .doc one and not an RTF one with the wrong extension. How can I do that?

Thanks

Kati

Well you could check the files extension but this would prove nothing. The only other way you could find out it drop them into notepad .rtf documents are mostly text and start with something like

{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\deff0\deflang1033{\fonttbl{\f0\fswiss\fcharset0 Arial;}}

That may be time consuming depending on the number of documents but you could also write some code that checks the first couple bytes of the file. I know .doc documents start with a header like ÐÏ à¡ but I maybe wrong you really need to look up on the format it’s self

Can you please give me an example of how to open a .doc and check first bytes in vb?

hi try this. but bare in mind this is not the correct way. you really need to read on the format but if you only want it for basic stuff I shoud be ok.

VB Code:

Private Sub Command1_Click()
Dim iFile As Long
Dim sHead As String
    sHead = Space(4)
    
    iFile = FreeFile
    Open "C:\test.doc" For Binary As #iFile
        Get #iFile, , sHead
    Close #iFile
    
    If Not sHead = "ÐÏà" Then
        MsgBox "Is Not Word Document"
    Else
        MsgBox "Is Word Document File"
    End If
    
    sHead = ""
    
End Sub

thanks a lot!! :wave: