redocx

A blazing-fast .docx decoder

Usage

redocx is super simple to use! Just run:

$ redocx -f path/to/input/file.docx [-o path/to/optional/output/file.txt]

Installation

There are two dependencies for redocx: libzip and libxml2. Both of these libraries must also be registered with pkg-config. How those two things are installed varies based on your system. For example:

• MacOS

brew install libxml2
brew install libzip

• Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S libxml2
sudo pacman -S libzip

Once those are installed, clone the repo, and move into the directory. Then follow the ritual:

./configure
make
sudo make install

Inspiration

I have, like most developers, read the famous webiquitte article. While reading it, I was thinking, "Surely someone out there has made a Word Document decoder for these hackers?! Why would they be annoyed, if they could just decode it?" So I got to searching. The best I was able to find was this project which, with all due respect to the creator, does not create neat or readable code. Newlines are not, for example, carried over. So, I set about to make my own.

Benchmarks

redocx lives up to its description as a "blazing fast" decoder. For a small (~13kb) word document (Around one average length paragraph)... well, you can see the results yourself. For a larger document, it takes slightly longer, but... For a huge novel (115kb): It's faster than anything else out there for decoding text from a .docx archive. It may also be intiresting to note that I wrote a rust version of this program. However, it was abandoned because redocx performed 13.55 times (on average) better. Thanks to sharkdp for the utility used in the benchmarking.