Reading other formats i.e Winword

Does anyone know of any "translation" php code or sources of information that will allow me to write such to be able to read file formats such as Winword ?

The reason is I have a massive legacy system mostly in Word for Windows that I need to automate.

Thanks

You might be able to find some command-line utility that can to the conversion from winword to clear text (assuming that is what you want to do) and call it with back-quotes from your script like this:

`command file.doc file.txt`;