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

Maven dep:

    
        org.apache.pdfbox
        pdfbox
        2.0.9
    

Then the fucntion to get the pdf text as String.

private static String readPDF(File pdf) throws InvalidPasswordException, IOException {
    try (PDDocument document = PDDocument.load(pdf)) {

        document.getClass();

        if (!document.isEncrypted()) {

            PDFTextStripperByArea stripper = new PDFTextStripperByArea();
            stripper.setSortByPosition(true);

            PDFTextStripper tStripper = new PDFTextStripper();

            String pdfFileInText = tStripper.getText(document);
            // System.out.println("Text:" + st);

            // split by whitespace
            String lines[] = pdfFileInText.split("\\r?\\n");
            List pdfLines = new ArrayList<>();
            StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
            for (String line : lines) {
                System.out.println(line);
                pdfLines.add(line);
                sb.append(line + "\n");
            }
            return sb.toString();
        }

    }
    return null;
}