How to embed Google Docs document into your page

Serguei Dosyukov — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:01:32 +0000

There are plenty of presentations, documents, and spreadsheets we may want to share with the world.

We can use homegrown document handling solutions, use commercial 3rd party solutions or… utilize power provided by Google Docs.

When storing articles on Google Docs you are provided with the option to share them with some people only or with everyone. I like to have option to link my articles from anywhere but I also like to have not just plain page, but a page embedded into my web-site pages.

What it means is that instead of external page, I want to put it in my own box.

There was time when it wasn’t as easy because of the additional code Google was injecting into articles, but time changed and now it is fairly easy and strait forward.

Goals

Embed Google Docs document into existing page
PHP. This is not really a requirement per se, it is just code below is PHP.
Retain copyright information

Solution

The following code snippet allows to get a desired result

// id parameter is used to pass Google Docs arcticle id
// Example: mydocview.php?id=nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

$id    = $_REQUEST['id'];
if ($id) {
  $started = "0";
  echo('Stored and managed via Google Docs © -- Web word processing, presentations and spreadsheets.');

  // Read document content, parse to normalize and output
  $file = fopen ("http://docs.google.com/View?id=" . $id, "r");
  while (!feof ($file)) {
    $line = fgets ($file, 4096);

    // Parse header info out
    if ($started == "0") {
      if (substr($line, 0, 5) == '')) { $started = "2"; }
      else { continue; }
    }

    // Output document content
    if ($started == "2") {
      // Stop processing, end of content reached
      if (strstr($line, '')) { break; }

      // Normalize image links to keep link back to google docs
      $line = str_replace('src="File?id', 'src="http://docs.google.com/File?id', $line);

      // Normalize links to other articles
      $line = str_replace('href="View?docid=', 'href="/mydocview.php?id=', $line);
      $line = str_replace('href="View?id=', 'href="/mydocview.php?id=', $line);
      $line = str_replace('href="View?docID=', 'href="/mydocview.php?id=', $line);
      $line = str_replace('href="View?', 'href="/mydocview.php?', $line);

      // Output result
      echo($line);
    }
  }
  fclose($file);
}

Sample page:

Serge's Technology View » embed google docs content

How to embed Google Docs document into your page

Goals

Solution