php

When trying to view the document of this format we get not-readable information, like

{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1251\deff0\deflang1049{\fonttbl{\f0\froman\fcharset204
Calibri;}{\f1\fnil\fcharset0 Calibri;}}
\fs36\'cf\'c0\'d0\'d3\'d1\par
\b0\fs22\'c1\'e5\'eb\'e5\'e5\'f2 \'ef\'e0\'f0\'f3\'f1 \'ee\'e4\'e8\'ed\'ee\'ea\'ee\'e9

The more detailed screenshot see in the attachments.

So what we see is 8-bit data format, which is good, as that means that it will not be that difficult to extract the information. Generally RTF consists of control words, that can be grouped in nested sets. Control words begin with backslash ('\') and the group is limited with figure brackets ('{' and '}'). Control word can be any a-z word and could be followed by a number value, and also could contain one non-digit-letter ascii symbol.

So, sequence like \rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1251 is divided in 3 control words: rtf with parameter 1 (format major version), ansi (current encoding) and ansicpg with parameter 1251 (codepage Windows-1251).

Nested set define the scope of control words, so everything defined in {} works in it and all children sets. So in order to keep the current set of working control words, a stack is needed - adding elements with opening bracket and remove with closing. Some control words can be closed not only with closing bracket { but also with adding the parameter 0. For example: This is \b bold \b0 text.

As the initial encoding from RTF is ANSI, then english text will be saved without any special operations. But as I am interested in more general approach, at least getting Russian, and even better - Unicode. So, RTF gives a possibility to encode the rest of ASCII table (more than 128), taking in account the current codepage, of course (\ansicpg). A special sequence is used: \'hh, where hh - is a hex-code of the symbol from ASCII table. The unicode symbols are encoded as a sequence \uABCD, where ABCD is a decimal code of the unicode-symbol.

But, during the testing it appeared that it is not htat easy with Unicode as it seems. The problem is that RTF has another control word: \ucN, which is tightly coupled with Unicode. The thing is that Unicode is strongly supporting the old standards and systems, which could be used to read the rtf-file. Fro example, PC with Windows 3.11 will not be able to read Unicode. In order to let him show at least something in this case, after every unicode-symbol encoded with control word \u several symbols can be define , which should be displayed in case rtf-viewer cannot show of recognize current information.

Because of this, most of the current text processors put '?' after each unicode-control word, as a symbol to be showed instead of the current symbeol, in extreme cases. But some variations are also possible, like \u915FValue. So the keyword \ucN is used to tell, how many symbols should we display if we cann't show unicode. So, if in front of unicode data we get something like \uc1, that means we should skip one symbol after each unicode-symbol control word.

So, after mining this information from the specifications of the format, we can already write the code. The source code is provided in ther attachments.

So the suggested algorithm will work with most of RTF document, but there are some way to enhance it if you like. For example, a good thing would be to cut all non-textual data, in my implementation I cut out only fonts, colors, themes, binary data and everything marked as "don't read me if you can't" (\*). Another good option would be to parse the encoding and codepage in order to better display keywords as \'hh.

References
[1] www.latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/RTF-Spec-1.0.txt

[2] www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=DD422B8D-FF06-4207-B47...

Actually this task appeared to be not that hard as I first thought. To make the task more real, I was working with Russian language, i.e. with CP1251.

So at first I tried to open the documents with simple Lister. The screenshot of the experiment is provided in the attachments. Both files, odt and docx, look like binary files from this point of view. But the most important detail to notice (and it's quite small I would say) is th letters "PK" in the beginning of the data. That actually means that both files are, somewhere deep in their soul, just a zip-archive, which extension was renamed either to odt or to docx.

If we open any of the files in Total Commander using Ctrl+PageDown (Open element under the cursor) we will get a structured content with some folders and XML documents. The screenshot of the experiment is provided in the attachments.

The content that we need is situated in the file content.xml (in ODT) and word/document.xml (in DOCX).

So, in order to extract textual information from ODT ot DOCX formats, we will have to use the standard ZipArchive class and some functions to work with it.
The source code is provided in the attachments. The solution works under PHP 5.2+ and requires php_zip.dll for Windows or --enable-zip key for Linux. In case of unavailability of ZipArchive (like old PHP or lack of libraries) one could use PclZip (http://www.phpconcept.net/pclzip/index.en.php) .

References:
www.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa338205.aspx
http://www.i-rs.ru/content/download/1447/8162/file/OpenDocument-v1.0-os.pdf

After hours of search in the internet I figured out that flash in combination with actionscript 3 is able to provide mutli-select file dialogs. So I included a small flash file in my website to read the given input files and send them via a HTTP post request to a PHP file which moves the uploaded files iteratively to the specified destination location. In the constructor of the actionscript file I defined a file reference object and added some events that invoke certain methods automatically:<code>fileRef = new FileReferenceList();fileRef.addEventListener(Event.OPEN, fileRefListener_onOpen);fileRef.addEventListener(Event.CANCEL, fileRefListener_onCancel);fileRef.addEventListener(Event.SELECT, fileRefListener_onSelect);fileRef.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.PROGRESS, fileRefListener_onProgress);fileRef.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, fileRefListener_onComplete);</code>After that I specified a bunch of methods. The first one will be called if the user hits the “Upload-Files” button. It specifies the sort of files allowed to be uploaded (filter) and opens the upload dialog:private function browseClick(event:Event) {                var fileFilter:FileFilter = new FileFilter("Images", "*.jpg;*.jpeg;*.png");    fileRef.browse([fileFilter]);}Now I wrote the methods defined in the constructor that will be called automatically because of the event listeners. The most important is the “fileRefListener_onSelect”-method. It stores all file references in an array:public function fileRefListener_onSelect(event:Event) {        var fileRefList:FileReferenceList = FileReferenceList(event.target);    var list:Array = fileRefList.fileList;    var tempList = new Array();        for (var i:uint = 0; i < list.length; i++) {                                        tempList.push(list[i])    }        filesToUpload = filesToUpload.concat(tempList);}The other listener methods can be specified in the same way. They will be called if the file upload has started, ended or is still in progress (progress diagrams). In one last method I told the script to start the upload on the collection of filereferences . The variable “pathUploadScript” contains the URL of the PHP script:public function uploadFiles(event:Event){                filesUploaded = 0;        var item;    for(var i:Number = 0; i < filesToUpload.length; i++) {                item = filesToUpload[i];        item.addEventListener(Event.OPEN, fileRefListener_onOpen);        item.addEventListener(Event.CANCEL, fileRefListener_onCancel);                        item.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.PROGRESS, fileRefListener_onProgress);        item.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, fileRefListener_onComplete);        var url:URLRequest = new URLRequest(pathUploadScript);                if(!item.upload(url)) {            status_txt.htmlText = "Upload dialog failed to open.";        }    }}    The smallest version of this PHP file has to look similar to this:$uploadFile = $dir."/".$_FILES['Filedata']['name'];move_uploaded_file($_FILES['Filedata']['tmp_name'], $uploadFile);It moves the file from the temporary upload directory to a location I specified in $uploadFile.

The solution to "Eays access to MySQL data on shared hosting service" is the following, and has already performed and tested at a shared hosting service:

• The third party tool "PhpMyAdmin" is copied into a separate folder on the shared hosting service.
• The tool is either password protected, or (if folder listing is disabled) located at a hidden url, e.g. a long passphrase added to the usual "phpMyAdmin" address string.
• MySQL manipulations can be done directly in phpMyAdmin.