README.md

Docx4JSRUtil - Search and replace util for Docx4J

Docx4JSearchAndRreplaceUtil library helps you to search and replace text inside docx-Documents parsed by Docx4J.

What it does

When you write a placeholder inside a .docx-Document, e.g. ${NAME}, there is no guarantee this string lands "as is" inside the underlying XML. There can be style markup in between.

Therefore ${NAME} is most probably $ + { + NAME + }. This means we can't just do a simple replace on a Text-object (a Docx4J-Type).

Docx4JSRUtil solves this problem.

Usage:

pom.xml / Maven

<dependency>
    <groupId>de.phip1611</groupId>
    <artifactId>docx4j-search-and-replace-util</artifactId>
    <version>%latest version%</version>
</dependency>

Code

WordprocessingMLPackage template = WordprocessingMLPackage.load(new FileInputStream(new File("document.docx")));;

// that's it; you can now save `template`, export it as PDF or whatever you want to do
Docx4JSRUtil.searchAndReplace(template, Map.of(
        "${NAME}", "Philipp",
        "${SURNAME}", "Schuster",
        "${PLACE_OF_BIRTH}", "GERMANY"
));

Requirements

Docx4JSRUtil (1.0.2) uses Java 8 as minimum version and should work with all higher Java versions as well. It uses docx4j-JAXB-ReferenceImpl instead of MOXy. There are no technical reasons for this limitation.

How it works internally

1. It retrieves the list of all Text-objects (in correct order) from Docx4J
2. creates a "complete string" (Text-list reduced to a single string via concatenation)
3. build lookup information to get from index in complete string to corresponding text object
4. do search for placeholders in "complete string"
5. build a List<ReplaceCommand> that is ordered from the last index in the "complete string" to the first (that's important to not invalidate indices of other ReplaceCommands during replacement!)
6. figure out on which Text-objects changes has to be done and do the actual replacement

Limitations for place holders

Place holders can be any string pattern, it doesn't have to be ${}.