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('<div class="googledocs" >Stored and managed via <a title="Learn more about Google Docs" href="http://docs.google.com" target="_blank">Google Docs © -- Web word processing, presentations and spreadsheets.</a></div>');
// 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) == '<body') { $started = "1"; }
else { continue; }
}
// Parse body content until document content block is detected
if ($started == "1") {
if (strstr($line, '<div id="doc-contents">')) { $started = "2"; }
else { continue; }
}
// Output document content
if ($started == "2") {
// Stop processing, end of content reached
if (strstr($line, '<div id="google-view-footer">')) { 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:
<html> <head></head> <body> <? // Include code above here ?> </body> </html>
