Apache Lucene--How to parse texts from PDF files?

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In my previous post I show you how to parse text from MSWord files. In this post I will be showing you guys how to parse text from PDF files.

For parsing pdf file I am using PDFBox library. It is a free open source tool. There is another library called Aspire PDF but it is a commercial version and as a free product it parses 1000 words per page or something. Aspire can also be used as OCR. But I am not explaining details about these libraries.

Here is sample code to parse text from pdf files.

/*
 * To change this template, choose Tools | Templates
 * and open the template in the editor.
 */
package com.blogspot.computergodzilla.parsers;

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.IOException;
import org.apache.pdfbox.cos.COSDocument;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdfparser.PDFParser;
import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocument;
import org.apache.pdfbox.util.PDFTextStripper;

/**
 * This class parses the pdf file.
 * i.e this class returns the text from the pdf file.
 * @author Mubin Shrestha
 */
public class PdfFileParser {
   /**
    * This method returns the pdf content in text form.
    * @param pdffilePath : pdf file path of which you want to parse text
    * @return : texts from pdf file
    * @throws FileNotFoundException
    * @throws IOException 
    */
    public String PdfFileParser(String pdffilePath) throws FileNotFoundException, IOException
    {
        String content;
        FileInputStream fi = new FileInputStream(new File(pdffilePath));
        PDFParser parser = new PDFParser(fi);
        parser.parse();
        COSDocument cd = parser.getDocument();
        PDFTextStripper stripper = new PDFTextStripper();
        content = stripper.getText(new PDDocument(cd));
        cd.close();
        return content;
    }
    
    /**
     * Main method.
     * @param args
     * @throws FileNotFoundException
     * @throws IOException 
     */
    public static void main(String args[]) throws FileNotFoundException, IOException
    {
        String filepath = "H:/lab.pdf";
        System.out.println(new PdfFileParser().PdfFileParser(filepath));    
    }
}

This is it. Enough with parsing and blah blah. In my next post I will show you how to index these parsed files.