How to extract text from a PDF file with Apache PDFBox

Question

I would like to extract text from a given PDF file with Apache PDFBox.

I wrote this code:

PDFTextStripper pdfStripper = null;
PDDocument pdDoc = null         


        

Answer 1

Using PDFBox 2.0.7, this is how I get the text of a PDF:

static String getText(File pdfFile) throws IOException {
    PDDocument doc = PDDocument.load(pdfFile);
    return new PDFTextStripper().getText(doc);
}

Call it like this:

try {
    String text = getText(new File("/home/me/test.pdf"));
    System.out.println("Text in PDF: " + text);
} catch (IOException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}

---

Since user oivemaria asked in the comments:

You can use PDFBox in your application by adding it to your dependencies in build.gradle:

dependencies {
  compile group: 'org.apache.pdfbox', name: 'pdfbox', version: '2.0.7'
}

Here's more on dependency management using Gradle.

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If you want to keep the PDF's format in the parsed text, give PDFLayoutTextStripper a try.