Java – apache poi Word documents (.doc, .docx) updating

For HWPF (.doc), the classes you probably want are:

• http://poi.apache.org/apidocs/org/apache/poi/hwpf/usermodel/ParagraphProperties.html
• http://poi.apache.org/apidocs/org/apache/poi/hwpf/usermodel/CharacterProperties.html
• http://poi.apache.org/apidocs/org/apache/poi/hwpf/model/StyleDescription.html

Depending on the exact property you want, it may be on the paragraph or the character properties.

The best example I can think of for reading a word document with HWPF and getting text, checking styles and formatting etc is WordExtractor from Apache Tika: https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/tika/trunk/tika-parsers/src/main/java/org/apache/tika/parser/microsoft/WordExtractor.java

(XWPF for .docx is similar)

The method you need is XWPFRun.setText(String). Simply work your way through the file until you find the XWPFRun of interest, work out what you want the new text to be, and replace it. (A run is a sequence of text with the same formatting)

You should be able to do something like:

XWPFDocument doc = new XWPFDocument(OPCPackage.open("input.docx"));
for (XWPFParagraph p : doc.getParagraphs()) {
    List<XWPFRun> runs = p.getRuns();
    if (runs != null) {
        for (XWPFRun r : runs) {
            String text = r.getText(0);
            if (text != null && text.contains("needle")) {
                text = text.replace("needle", "haystack");
                r.setText(text, 0);
            }
        }
    }
}
for (XWPFTable tbl : doc.getTables()) {
   for (XWPFTableRow row : tbl.getRows()) {
      for (XWPFTableCell cell : row.getTableCells()) {
         for (XWPFParagraph p : cell.getParagraphs()) {
            for (XWPFRun r : p.getRuns()) {
              String text = r.getText(0);
              if (text != null && text.contains("needle")) {
                text = text.replace("needle", "haystack");
                r.setText(text,0);
              }
            }
         }
      }
   }
}
doc.write(new FileOutputStream("output.docx"));