Find & Replace with MS Word

While browsing through some DZone Ruby Snippets, I came across this nice little example of using Ruby to automate Find & Replace in Microsoft Word, compliments of Tim Morgan.

You could use such a snippet as part of a mail-merge type solution. To use it, create a form letter in a Word document, with bracketed placeholders where the actual values are to be inserted. Example:

Dear [name],

On [date] account [account_number] was charged a [amount] fee.

Let's take a walk through the code...

Load the win32ole library:

require 'win32ole'

Launch Microsoft Word:

word = WIN32OLE.new('Word.Application')

Open the template document:

doc = word.Documents.Open('c:\file_to_open.doc')

Iterate over a hash containing keys and values. Each key is the placeholder code and the corresponding value is the text to insert:

{
  'name' => 'Tim Morgan',
  'date' => Date.today.strftime('%B %d, %Y'),
  'account_number' => '123456',
  'amount' => '$45.76'
}.each do |key, value|

Start the search at the beginning of the document:

word.Selection.HomeKey(unit=6)

Grab a reference to the Find object:

find = word.Selection.Find

Set the Find object's text string (the hash key) to locate, surrounded by brackets:

find.Text = "[#{key}]"

For each occurrence of the string found (via the Find object's Execute method), insert the replacement text (the hash value):

while word.Selection.Find.Execute
  word.Selection.TypeText(text=value)
end

Save the document with a new name:

doc.SaveAs('c:\output_file.doc')

Close the document:

doc.Close

The example above shows the hash hard-coded in the script, but you could build on this to load an array of hashes from a text or YAML file, Excel worksheet, or database table.

My thanks to Tim Morgan, who posted the original snippet on Dzone, and to you, for stopping by to read it!