DocRipper is an extremely lightweight Ruby wrapper that can be used to parse text contents from common file formats (currently .doc, .docx and .pdf) without the need for a large number of dependencies like an OCR library or OpenOffice/LibreOffice.

For simple parsing, you'll likely see a large performance improvement with DocRipper over solutions that rely on OpenOffice/LibreOffice for .doc/.docx conversion. I found

Need OCR support or in-image text parsing? Take a look at Docsplit.

Quickstart

  gem install doc_ripper

Specify a file to parse

  DocRipper::TextRipper.new('/path/to/file')

Return the file's text

  dr = DocRipper::TextRipper.new('/path/to/file')
  dr.text
  => "Document's text"

If the file cannot be read, nil will be returned.

  dr = DocRipper::TextRipper.new('/path/to/missing/file')
  dr.text
  => nil

Dependencies

• Ruby version >= 1.9.2
• Poppler-utils/(pdftotext) (PDF)
• Antiword (docx) more info: http://linux.die.net/man/1/antiword