Re: no-word.el fails on Windows NT

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Wed, 23 May 2007 18:17:03 -0400
> From: poti@potis.org
> 
> I am looking for an emacs interface for reading Microsoft Word
> documents. I have been using antiword, which is fine and has 
> an emacs mode provided by no-word.el. This works fine on OSX and 
> Linux. However, when I visit a doc file on Windows NT, I get the
> following error:
> 
> - is not a Word Document.
> 
> 
> This appears to be related to the following elisp code:
>         (if file (replace-regexp-in-string " " "\\ " file t t) "-")
> which is concatenated to the command "antiword" and options.
> This is in the no-word function, where file is optional. 
> Apparently, visiting the file does not pass a file to this function. 
> This is as much as I can figure out. Why is the behavior different on 
> Windows, is there a fix that will work as expected across platforms?

I think this is a bug in no-word.el: it assumes that the shell invoked
by shell-command-on-region is a Unixy shell, and so uses that shell's
quoting rules to escape-protect spaces in file names.  But on Windows,
the standard shell is cmd.exe, which doesn't understand those quoting
rules.

Try to change the above line to this (untested):

        (if file (setq file (shell-quote-argument file)))

(this uses the quoting rules suitable for the underlying platform's
shell).

Note that there are 2 more instances of such quoting in no-word.el;
you may wish to modify them as well.

Also, you should probably report the problem to the author.