Trouble parsing and changing Hyperlinks in a Word document

Let me preface this with the fact that I am aware that there's a lot of resources online for this. So many in fact, that I have trouble finding a solution for my particular issue.

The goal:

We have a folder full of word and excel docs, that point to eachother and also other word documents. The network share they were on has been changed, and so links pointing to file://\\old_share\folder\document.doc no longer work. My intention was to go through every document, and change the Address of the links to the new share e.g. file://\\new_share\folder\document.doc.

These word documents are mixed between versions, so some are docx, some are doc, etc.

What I have so far:

I've tried using Python, PowerShell, C#. The exact implementation is almost identical. I open a handle to word.application, then I open the document, and then I try to iterate through the Hyperlinks field and do my work.

For now I would be happy to just print them to the screen so this is my minimal example of what I have so far.

$word                = New-Object -ComObject word.application
$word.Visible        = $false
$word.ScreenUpdating = $false

$folder = "\\new_share\folder"
$docs = Get-ChildItem -Recurse -LiteralPath $folder -file -include '*.doc*'

foreach($doc in $docs){
    $thisDoc = $word.Documents.Open($_.FullName)
    $link = [pscustomobject]@{
           FileName  = $doc.FullName
           HyperLink = $thisDoc.Address            
    }
    Write-Host "$($link.FileName) => $($link.HyperLink)"
    $thisDoc.Close()
}

$Word.Quit()

# cleanup com objects
[System.Runtime.Interopservices.Marshal]::ReleaseComObject($word) | Out-Null
[System.GC]::Collect()
[System.GC]::WaitForPendingFinalizers()

From this I am expecting to see the addresses, so a bunch of (\old_share\folder...), what I get instead is a bunch of Hyperlinks with $null Address fields. I'm sure that I am doing something wrong, but I'd really appreciate any ideas.

using a com object to open the file and read the Hyperlinks field.

I also considered just unzipping the docx files, and changing the links directly inside the xml, but not all documents are docx, and I feel that it is much more slow and complex to do.

Solution

To search for and change the hyperlinks .Address properties in Word documents, you need to loop over the documents .Hyperlinks collection as I have already commented.

The below code will do that for you.

$oldPath = '\\old_share\folder\'
$newPath = '\\new_share\folder\'

$word                = New-Object -ComObject Word.Application
$word.Visible        = $false
$word.ScreenUpdating = $false

$folder = "\\new_share\folder"
$docs   = Get-ChildItem -Recurse -LiteralPath $folder -File -Filter '*.doc*'

foreach($doc in $docs){
    $updated = $false
    $thisDoc = $word.Documents.Open($doc.FullName)
    $thisDoc.HyperLinks | ForEach-Object {
        if ($_.Address -like "*$oldPath*") {
            Write-Host ("Replaced hyperlink '{0}' in document {1}" -f $_.TextToDisplay, $doc.FullName)
            $_.Address = $_.Address -replace [regex]::Escape($oldPath), $newPath
            $updated = $true
        }
    }
    $thisDoc.Close($updated)
}

$Word.Quit()

# cleanup com objects
$null = [System.Runtime.Interopservices.Marshal]::ReleaseComObject($thisDoc)
$null = [System.Runtime.Interopservices.Marshal]::ReleaseComObject($word)
[System.GC]::Collect()
[System.GC]::WaitForPendingFinalizers()