Extracting ordered list of words from documents comprising text and code fragments, without interpreting the code fragments

This invention relates generally to converting documents, and more particularly to converting documents that are formatted with a mark-up language. A computer implemented method is applied to convert a formatted document or text to an ordered list of words. The formatted document is first partitioned into first and second data structures stored in a memory of a computer. The first data structure stores text fragments, and the second data structure stores code fragments of the formatted document. Adjacent text fragments are concatenated to form possible ordered word lists. Possible words are matched against a dictionary of representative words. A best ordered word list having the fewest number of words is selected from the possible ordered word lists.