Data Extraction (MS Word) (Question for IT types)

[samn01]

A question I am hoping some of you IT Phers might be able to help me with.
I have a many thousand CVs stored on my hard drive that are not in any type of database.
What I want to do is extract the email address information from each CV so I can put together a mailshot of sorts. Is there a tool that I can use to do this?
I guess the email address is easily identifiable by the @ sign or the .com/.co.uk tag.
It is just a question of how to extract the addresses and store them in a usable form.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Sam

[mduroe]

Hmmm. Bit of a tricky one. I can't think of a tool that will do it as such. I'm not sure if any of the users know of a scrpt that will do it. It will be a pain in the arse, but you could download a scrpting language such as PERL for windows, and then write a PERL scrpts that will do a text search on your drive and direct the output to a text file of any occurance of a field found with an '@' sign in it.

You'll need to do a bit of work to get this working, but downloading PERL and getting a simple scrpt to do it, I reckon will take about 4-5 hours learning. Depends how much you need to data.

Try doing a search on google or Ask Jeeves on extracting text from files.

Good Luck,

Marcos

[CarZee]

hmm.. what format are the files in?

If flat text it's a piece of umm.. it's pretty easy.. even at a command line..

in nt/win2k, assuming files are all something.txt in the current folder:

for /f %a in (*.txt) do type %a | find "@" >> email-addresses.tx_

then rename email-addresses.tx_ to email-addresses.txt and open it.

If they're all in word format you can do it in VBA (a macro) but that's a little more complicated.

Edited to say I should have read the title.. either find a tool that'll do a bulk conversion of them all to plain text and then do the above or back to Macros/VBA at which point I'd point you at someone more readily able to advise on that task.

>> Edited by CarZee (moderator) on Tuesday 4th March 23:54

[samn01]

Thanks guys, I guess this is abit more complex than I had thought......!

Perl and VBA are well beyond me. But as my luck would have it I do have a VBA contractor working for me at the mo, I may just have to arrange a beer or two.

Thanks again !!