Can PHP read text from a PowerPoint file?

Question

I want to have PHP read an (uploaded) powerpoint presentation, and minimally extract the text from each slide (grabbing more info like images and layouts would even be bette

Answer 1

Here's a sample function I created form a similar one that extracts text from Word documents. I tested it with Microsoft PowerPoint files, but it won't decode OpenOfficeImpress files saved as .ppt

For .pptx files you might want to take a look at Zend Lucene.

    function parsePPT($filename) {
    // This approach uses detection of the string "chr(0f).Hex_value.chr(0x00).chr(0x00).chr(0x00)" to find text strings, which are then terminated by another NUL chr(0x00). [1] Get text between delimiters [2] 
    $fileHandle = fopen($filename, "r");
    $line = @fread($fileHandle, filesize($filename));
    $lines = explode(chr(0x0f),$line);
    $outtext = '';

    foreach($lines as $thisline) {
        if (strpos($thisline, chr(0x00).chr(0x00).chr(0x00)) == 1) {
            $text_line = substr($thisline, 4);
            $end_pos   = strpos($text_line, chr(0x00));
            $text_line = substr($text_line, 0, $end_pos);
            $text_line = preg_replace("/[^a-zA-Z0-9\s\,\.\-\n\r\t@\/\_\(\)]/","",$text_line);
            if (strlen($text_line) > 1) {
                $outtext.= substr($text_line, 0, $end_pos)."\n";
            }
        }
    }
    return $outtext;
}