How Modern C++ Parses a Word Document in a Clean Functional Pipeline

Working with old document formats often turns into archaeology — XML digging, platform-specific hacks, or very verbose parsing chains.

But modern C++20 allows a surprisingly clean, composable approach.

Here’s what a full MS Word (.doc or .docx) parsing pipeline looks like today using an operator-pipe style:

std::filesystem::path("data_processing_definition.doc")
| content_type::detector{}
| office_formats_parser{}
| PlainTextExporter()
| out_stream;

ensure(out_stream.str()) ==
"Data processing refers to the activities performed on raw data...";



No COM.
No platform-specific APIs.
No manual XML manipulation.
Just a functional, readable pipeline.

I'm honestly curious how other languages express a similar parsing chain.
If you work with Python, Rust, Go, Java, C#, or JS — how would you model this?

Would love to see your idiomatic equivalents.

https://redd.it/1pkekq6
@r_cpp