Extracting text from Word Documents via PHP and COM

$word = new COM("word.application") or die ("Could not initialise MS Word object.");
$word->Documents->Open(realpath("Sample.doc"));

// Extract content.
$content = (string) $word->ActiveDocument->Content;

echo $content;

$word->ActiveDocument->Close(false);

$word->Quit();
$word = null;
unset($word);