matasarei/text-at-any-cost

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Text at any cost: get text from any office document (DOC, DOCX, ODT, PDF and other).

dev-master 2026-07-27 06:26 UTC

Requires

• php: ^7.4 || ^8.0
• ext-dom: *
• ext-zip: *
• ext-zlib: *

Requires (Dev)

• phpunit/phpunit: ^9.6

Unknown License

Published on Packagist.org on 2026-07-27 06:27 UTC

README

Note: This project is an archived, historical example of parsing binary document formats natively in PHP.

A lightweight, zero-dependency PHP library for extracting raw text from various office and binary document formats (DOC, PPT, PDF, RTF, DOCX, ODT).

How it works

This library attempts to parse the binary streams (like Microsoft's legacy Compound File Binary Format) and raw hex/byte representations directly in PHP to strip out the text. For zipped XML formats (like DOCX and ODT), it uses ZipArchive and regular expressions to extract text from the internal XML nodes.

Requirements

• PHP 7.4+
• ext-zip
• ext-dom
• ext-zlib

Installation

composer require matasarei/text-at-any-cost

Usage

use TextAtAnyCost\Doc;
use TextAtAnyCost\Pdf;
use TextAtAnyCost\ZippedXml;

// Extract text from legacy .doc
$docText = Doc::doc2text('path/to/file.doc');

// Extract text from PDF
$pdfText = Pdf::pdf2text('path/to/file.pdf');

// Extract text from modern .docx
$docxText = ZippedXml::docx2text('path/to/file.docx');

⚠️ Why you probably shouldn't use this in production today

This library was originally written around 2009. While it is incredibly fast and memory-efficient compared to heavy DOM-building libraries, extracting text from complex formats like PDF or legacy binary DOC using native PHP streams and regular expressions is extremely brittle.

It will likely fail or output garbage characters when encountering:

• Documents with complex layouts, nested tables, or embedded objects
• Unconventional text encodings
• Newer revisions of the PDF or Microsoft Office specifications

What you should use instead

If you need robust text extraction in a modern application, you should rely on established, community-maintained libraries or native C/C++ CLI tools:

Modern PHP Libraries

• PDF: Use Smalot/PdfParser
• Word/Office Formats: Use PHPOffice/PHPWord

Faster, Lightweight CLI Alternatives

For the same blazing-fast performance without the memory overhead of a massive PHP library, delegate the extraction to native system binaries using shell_exec() or Symfony Process:

• PDF: pdftotext (part of the poppler-utils package)
• Legacy DOC: antiword or catdoc
• Modern DOCX/ODT: docx2txt
• Unified (All formats): Apache Tika (requires Java) or Pandoc

Example of modern CLI extraction:

$safePath = escapeshellarg('path/to/file.pdf');
$text = shell_exec("pdftotext {$safePath} -");

Credits

Original Author: Alexey Rembish ([e-mail])