Is there a way to parse the text out of a Word doc with PHP?

My client wants me to extract the text out of an MS Word doc from MS Office 97 and forward to 2011 versions. Is there an API for that with PHP, free or commercial?

EDIT: Oh man, look at the comments. Yeah, I forgot to include "want this to work on Linux, as in C开发者_运维知识库entOS Linux (like most shared Linux hosting plans)".

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The only way I know of under linux is to use the Apache POI

http://poi.apache.org/

It's Java, but it's supposed to read and write both the new XML based files, and the older OLE Compound document files.