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Use OpenXML to replace text in DOCX file - strange content

I'm trying to use the OpenXML SDK and the samples on Microsoft's pages to replace placeholders with real content in Word documents.
It used to work as described here, but after editing the template file in Word adding headers and footers it stopped working. I wondered why and some debugging showed me this:
Which is the content of texts in this piece of code:
using (WordprocessingDocument wordDoc = WordprocessingDocument.Open(DocumentFile, true))
{
var texts = wordDoc.MainDocumentPart.Document.Body.Descendants<Text>().ToList();
}
So what I see here is that the body of the document is "fragmented", even though in Word the content looks like this:
Can somebody tell me how I can get around this?
I have been asked what I'm trying to achieve. Basically I want to replace user defined "placeholders" with real content. I want to treat the Word document like a template. The placeholders can be anything. In my above example they look like {var:Template1}, but that's just something I'm playing with. It could basically be any word.
So for example if the document contains the following paragraph:
Do not use the name USER_NAME
The user should be able to replace the USER_NAME placeholder with the word admin for example, keeping the formatting intact. The result should be
Do not use the name admin
The problem I see with working on paragraph level, concatenating the content and then replacing the content of the paragraph, I fear I'm losing the formatting that should be kept as in
Do not use the name admin

Various things can fragment text runs. Most frequently proofing markup (as apparently is the case here, where there are "squigglies") or rsid (used to compare documents and track who edited what, when), as well as the "Go back" bookmark Word sets in the background. These become readily apparent if you view the underlying WordOpenXML (using the Open XML SDK Productivity Tool, for example) in the document.xml "part".
It usually helps to go an element level "higher". In this case, get the list of Paragraph descendants and from there get all the Text descendants and concatenate their InnerText.

OpenXML is indeed fragmenting your text:
I created a library that does exactly this : render a word template with the values from a JSON.
From the documenation of docxtemplater :
Why you should use a library for this
Docx is a zipped format that contains some xml. If you want to build a simple replace {tag} by value system, it can already become complicated, because the {tag} is internally separated into <w:t>{</w:t><w:t>tag</w:t><w:t>}</w:t>. If you want to embed loops to iterate over an array, it becomes a real hassle.
The library basically will do the following to keep formatting :
If the text is :
<w:t>Hello</w:t>
<w:t>{name</w:t>
<w:t>} !</w:t>
<w:t>How are you ?</w:t>
The result would be :
<w:t>Hello</w:t>
<w:t>John !</w:t>
<w:t>How are you ?</w:t>
You also have to replace the tag by <w:t xml:space=\"preserve\"> to ensure that the space is not stripped out if they is any in your variables.

how to strip html code from a string in c#

Im coding an app for windows phone in c#.
the program creates a html file, in the course of the programs running i add a lot of html tags.
now i need to strip those from a string when needed.
now all my searches show me i can take a string turn it into an array then put it back together minus any words i dont want, now this is handy but wont work for my needs. i have no idea where to start or even if it is possible
here is an example of the strings i need to remove
testString = "AnotherTest<br>";
so this is a string of the parts i need to remove
List<string> partsToRemove ={"</a>","\">","<br>","<a","href=\"#"};
so how do i take "AnotherTest<br>" and remove all the parts included in partsToRemove?
To clarify:
i will only be removing html from small strings as needed not from a whole html file
to give a working concept:
my program is creating a back ground for a roleplay character, part of that process uses a "gang" generator, the gang generator provides the strings with html tags ready for placement (adding them on the fly is not possible with out radical alteration to my whole program) this is fine for the end result BUT i give users access to the generator itself so if they just want a gang they can use what i have created, this is then diplayed in a textbox (i could easierly change that to another web box) and if enabled the phone reads it out, so here i would take the string created for the gang and feed it through a method that strips the html code and returns a "clean" string
before posting i searched for a solution but all i came across was how to remove words, whole words.

You can try to use regex to do this:
Remove all html tags:
String result = Regex.Replace(htmlDocument, #"<[^>]*>", String.Empty);

for the case that you've shown, you can use this : /(<a|href=\\"#|">|</a>|<br>|\\)/gm regex
But since you might have many different types, the best is to keep a list of patterns, or try to figure out a pattern that matches all the different combinations that you have. It might be more suitable to split the document, and execute a regex multiple times, to keep the regex as simple as possible.
Hope I've answered you're question.

Plain text search in markdown text

I am trying to write code (in C#) that can search for any plain-text word or phrase in a markdown file. Currently I'm doing this by a long-winded method: convert the markdown to HTML, strip HTML element tags out of the HTML text and then use a simple regular expression to search that for the word/phrase in question. Needless to say, this can be pretty slow.
A concrete example might show the problem. Say the markdown file contains
Something ***significant***
I would like to be able to find that by providing the search phrase something significant (i.e. ignoring the ***'s).
Is there an efficient way of doing this (i.e. that avoids the conversion to HTML) and doesn't involve me writing my own markdown parser?
Edit:
I want a generic way to search for any text or phrase in markdown text that contains any valid markdown formatting. The first answers were ways to match the specific text example I gave.
Edit:
I should have made it clear: this is required for a simple user-facing search and the markdown files could contain any valid markdown formatting. For this reason I need to be able to ignore anything in the markdown that the user wouldn't see as text if they converted the markdown to HTML. E.g. the markdown text that specifies an image (like ![Valid XHTML](http://w3.org/Icons/valid-xhtml10). should be skipped during the search). Converting to HTML produces decent results for the user because it then reasonably accurately reflects what a user sees (but it's just a slow solution, esp when there's a lot of markdown text to look through).

Use a regexp
var str = "Something ***significant***";
var regexp = new Regex("Something.+significant.+");
Console.WriteLine(regexp.Match(str).Success);

I want to do the same thing. I think of one way to achieve that.
Your method has two steps.
Get the plain text out of the markdown source (which has also two steps. Markdown->HTML and HTML->stripped to plain text)
Search within the plain text
Now, if the markdown source is persisted in a data store, then you may be able to also persist the plain text for search purposes only. So the step to extract the plain text from the markdown may be executed only once when persisting the markdown source (or every time the markdown source is updated), but the code that actually searches in the markdown could be executed immediately on the already persisted plain text data as many times as you want.
For example, if you have a relational DB with a column like markdown_text, you could also create a plain_text column and recreate its value every time the markdown_text column is changed.
Users won't bother if saving their markdown takes a few milliseconds (or even seconds) more than before. Users tend to feel safe when something that alters the system's state takes some time (they feel that something is actually happening in the system), rather than happen immediately (they feel that something went wrong and their command did not execute). But they will feel frustrated if searching took more than a few ms to complete. In general users want queries to complete immediately but commands to take some time (not more than a few seconds though).

Try this:
string input = "Something ***significant***";
string v = input.Replace("***", "");
Console.WriteLine(v)
look this example: enter link description here

Replacing a word in a text file

I'm doing a little program where the data saved on some users are stored in a text file. I'm using Sytem.IO with the Streamwriter to write new information to my text file.
The text in the file is formatted like so :
name1, 1000, 387
name2, 2500, 144
... and so on. I'm using infos = line.Split(',') to return the different values into an array that is more useful for searching purposes. What I'm doing is using a While loop to search for the correct line (where the name match) and I return the number of points by using infos[1].
I'd like to modify this infos[1] value and set it to something else. I'm trying to find a way to replace a word in C# but I can't find a good way to do it. From what I've read there is no way to replace a single word, you have to rewrite the complete file.
Is there a way to delete a line completely, so that I could rewrite it at the end of the text file and not have to worried about it being duplicated?
I tried using the Replace keyword, but it didn't work. I'm a bit lost by looking at the answers proposed for similar problems, so I would really appreciate if someone could explain me what my options are.

If I understand you correctly, you can use File.ReadLines method and LINQ to accomplish this.First, get the line you want:
var line = File.ReadLines("path")
.FirstOrDefault(x => x.StartsWith("name1 or whatever"));
if(line != null)
{
/* change the line */
}
Then write the new line to your file excluding the old line:
var lines = File.ReadLines("path")
.Where(x => !x.StartsWith("name1 or whatever"));
var newLines = lines.Concat(new [] { line });
File.WriteAllLines("path", newLines);

The concept you are looking for is called 'RandomAccess' for file reading/writing. Most of the easy-to-use I/O methods in C# are 'SequentialAccess', meaning you read a chunk or a line and move forward to the next.
However, what you want to do is possible, but you need to read some tutorials on file streams. Here is a related SO question. .NET C# - Random access in text files - no easy way?
You are probably either reading the whole file, or reading it line-for-line as part of your search. If your fields are fixed length, you can read a fixed number of bytes, keep track of the Stream.Position as you read, know how many characters you are going to read and need to replace, and then open the file for writing, move to that exact position in the stream, and write the new value.
It's a bit complex if you are new to streams. If your file is not huge, copying a file line for line can be done pretty efficiently by the System.IO library if coded correctly, so you might just follow your second suggestion which is read the file line-for-line, write it to a new Stream (memory, temp file, whatever), replace the line in question when you get to that value, and when done, replace the original.

It is most likely you are new to C# and don't realize the strings are immutable (a fancy way of saying you can't change them). You can only get new strings from modifying the old:
String MyString = "abc 123 xyz";
MyString.Replace("123", "999"); // does not work
MyString = MyString.Replace("123", "999"); // works
[Edit:]
If I understand your follow-up question, you could do this:
infos[1] = infos[1].Replace("1000", "1500");

Data processing puzzle/headache

I have a CSV file I need to process which is a bit of a nightmare. Esentially it is the following
"Id","Name","Description"
"1","Test1","Test description text"
"2","Test2","<doc><style>body{font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";}</style><p class="test_class"
name="test_name">Lots of word xdoc content here.</p></doc>"
"guid-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx","Test3","Test description text 3"
I'm using the File Helpers library to process the CSV rather than reinvent the wheel. However, due to the description field containing unescaped Word xdoc xml which contains quotes it's getting rather confused when it comes to the start and end points of each record.
The following is an example mapping class.
[DelimitedRecord(","), IgnoreFirst(1), IgnoreEmptyLines()]
public class CSVDoc
{
#region Properties
[FieldQuoted('"', QuoteMode.AlwaysQuoted), FieldTrim(TrimMode.Both)]
public string Id;
[FieldQuoted('"', QuoteMode.AlwaysQuoted), FieldTrim(TrimMode.Both)]
public string Name;
[FieldQuoted('"', QuoteMode.AlwaysQuoted), FieldTrim(TrimMode.Both)]
public string Description;
[FieldQuoted('"', QuoteMode.AlwaysQuoted), FieldTrim(TrimMode.Both)]
}
I considered (despite my hate of regex for this kind of task) replacing all " with ' and then using ((?<=(^|',))'|'(?=($|,'))) pattern to replace all ' with " at the start and end of lines and where they are formatted ','. However, the dirty file contains some lines which end with a " and some css style attributes which are formatted ","
So now I'm left scratching my head trying to figure out how to do this and how it can be automated.
Any ideas?

You're going to have to re-invent the wheel, because that's not valid CSV or indeed a reasonable file at all - it doesn't have any sort of provably consistent escaping rules (e.g. we don't know if the plain-text columns are escaped correctly or not).
Your best bet is to ask the person producing this to fix the bug, it should be e.g.:
"2","Test2","<doc><style>body{font-family:""Calibri"",""sans-serif"";}</style><p class=""test_class""
name=""test_name"">Lots of word xdoc content here.</p></doc>"
Which your parser should handle fine, and which should not be hard for them to produce in a simple and efficient manner.
Failing that, you'll have to hand-code the parser to:
Read a line.
Check for unescaped " (any "that isn't followed by a " a , or whitespace.
If none found, parse as CSV.
If any found, parse as this horrible thing until you hit the line ending with "
It may be easier to look for < if that is consistently not used in the other lines. Or perhaps for <doc if it consistently identifies the correct rows.

If you don't mind doing some pre-processing before, you can change the first and second "," to "|" and then use FileHelper to parse the file normally (Assuming you don't have | in the last column where there are HTML tags)
The pre-processing could be something like (Simple pseudo code) :
var sb = new StringBuilder()
var regex = new Regex("\",\"");
foreach(string line in textFileLines)
{
sb.AppendLine(regex.Replace(line , "\"|\"", 2));
}

I worked on the CSV-1203 File Format standard a few months ago, so the first thing to realise is that you're not dealing with a CSV file - even though it's named "xyz.CSV".
As said by others here, it will be easier to write your own reader, they're not too difficult. I too have a hatred of everything regex, but the good news is you can code any solution without ever using it.
A couple of things: There's a really weird thing Excel does to CSV files that begin with the two capital letters ID (without quotes). It thinks your CSV is a corrupted SYLK file! Try it.
For details of this issue and a detailed CSV File Format specification, please refer to http://mastpoint.curzonnassau.com/csv-1203