In a recent blog post Akash Mehta showed how to reach into a Microsoft document (a Word file) and pull out the content inside via a PHP script.

Communicating via COM in PHP is easy as ever; especially for people coming from a VB background where executing complex tasks in MS-applications is a piece of cake, you will feel right at home in PHP. In fact, VB COM calls can be converted to PHP COM calls in just a few simple search and replaces.

He shows how to use the COM extension in a (Windows) PHP installation to access the text inside the document and manipulate the contents however you'd like (even writing them back out to another Word file).

The LoLoCoJr site has published part two of the series (part one is here) about converting a PHP application over to Rails.

In my previous post on this topic I described the method we used to convert a legacy MySQL PHP database to a Rails conformant PostgreSQL hosted version. In this article I will tell a bit about how we converted the HTML of the application to Rails layout templates and partials.

It's a quickpost this time showing how to extract the rendered HTML from the page's output, writing out some of the business logic, and a mention of test driven development versus write test after developing methods.