From: Daniel Carrera Date: 2003-10-29T08:34:46+09:00 Subject: [ANN] OOoExtract v0.1 Greetings, I'd like to announce the immediate availability of "OOoExtract" : http://www.math.umd.edu/~dcarrera/openoffice/tools/ooo_extract.html This is a command-line program, inspired by 'grep', to extract data from OpenOffice.org files according to certain regular expressions. This program is really cool and I'm very happy with it. It can make use of OOo's XML structure to make more intelligent and complex matches than a simple 'grep' could. OpenOffice.org has a concept of "styles". It has some pre-defined styles, and you can define your own. For example, if you have a list of poems, you can define a "Poem" style and a "PoemAuthor" style. You an then assign to them a particular appearance. This allows you to give your document a logical structure. OOoExtract can make use of this information to match not only text content, but also styles. For example: $ ruby ooo_extract.rb --style="PoemAuthor" poems.sxw Robert Frost Ernest Hemingway Robert Frost OOoExtract can also apply boolean operators to the search. $ ruby ooo_extract.rb --style="PoemAuthor" --text="R" file.sxw Robert Frost Robert Frost $ $ ruby ooo_extract.rb --style="PoemAuthor" --or --text="R" file.sxw Robert Frost Ernest Hemingway Robert Frost Richard M. Stallman $ $ ruby ooo_extract.rb --style="PoemAuthor" --xor --text="R" file.sxw Ernest Hemingway Richard M. Stallman $ $ ruby ooo_extract.rb --style="PoemAuthor" --xor --text="R" \ --ignore-case file.sxw Richard M. Stallman $ This program should be considered beta. OpenOffice.org files are very complex and I have only tested it in very simple scenarios. I have not tested it on files with tables, or lists. I have not tested it on anything but word processor documents (Writer). Let me know what you think. Cheers, -- Daniel Carrera | OpenPGP KeyID: 9AF77A88 PhD grad student. | Mathematics Dept. | "To understand recursion, you must first UMD, College Park | understand recursion".