Code to extract plain text from a pdf file php

Otherwise if you select and copy the text and paste it into Excel there is no way to extract the various columns again. This code assumes that the PDF file has text objects compressed using FlateDecode which seems to be standard.

This code is free. Use it for any purpose. The author assumes no liability whatsoever for the use of this code. Use it at your own risk! No precompiled headers, but uncomment if need be: Your project must also include zdll.

ZLIB can be freely downloaded from the internet, www. C by ziga. You can extract directly all the text from the entire PDF or separately by pages. If you want to handle separately every page of the PDF, you can iterate through the array of pages that you can retrieve with the getPages method of the PDF instance:. You can retrieve the text from a page in array format where every item in the array is a new line using the getTextArray method instead of getText.

Although there's no method to access directly a page by its number, you can simply access it in the array of pages with the getPages method of the PDF instance. This array is ordered in the same way that the PDF index 0 equal to the page 1 of the PDF so you can access the page by retrieving it from the array with the index. Note that you need to verify if the index number of page in the pages array exists, otherwise you will get an exception:. Interested in programming since he was 14 years old, Carlos is a self-taught programmer and founder and author of most of the articles at Our Code World.

It has been tested on several PDF files. The download contains one C file. To use it, create a simple Windows 32 Console project and add the pdf. You also need to go here bless them! Extract zdll. Also put zlib1. Also put zconf.

Now, step through the application and note that the input PDF and output text file names are hardwired at the start of the main method. If there is enough interest, the author may consider uploading a release version with a Windows interface. The code is quite good for extracting data from tables in a form that can be readily imported into Excel, with the column preserved because of the tabs that get added.

The main work gets done in the ProcessOutput method which processes the uncompressed stream to extract text portion of any text object. It looks as follows:.

This article has no explicit license attached to it but may contain usage terms in the article text or the download files themselves. If in doubt please contact the author via the discussion board below.

Sign in Email. Forgot your password? Search within: Articles Quick Answers Messages. Tagged as VC6. Stats Code to extract plain text from a PDF file. NeWi Rate me:. Please Sign up or sign in to vote. Source code that shows how to decompress and extract text from PDF documents. Download source files - 3. About Code This single source code file contains very simple, very basic C code. This code is supplied as is, no warranties.

Use at your own risk. Using The Code The download contains one C file. Future Enhancements If there is enough interest, the author may consider uploading a release version with a Windows interface. Code Snippets Stream sections are located using initially: C. Copy Code. A list of licenses authors might use can be found here. NeWi Web Developer. If you have questions post a comment here.

PDF data is not in readable format - Vipin Saini Nice blog I try - janny watson Now get extra text and images I'll give it a try - Pablo newbie Login Register. All class groups. Latest entries. Top 10 charts. Recommend this page to a friend! Post a comment See comments 19 Trackbacks 0 Top featured articles 1. Read this article that is the first of a series that will teach you about the challenge of processing the PDF file format and how the PdfToText class can be used to extract text and images from it.

By Christian Vigh wuthering-bytes. How to contribute to the development of the PdfToText class? Known Issues The following is a list of known issues. I'm still working on them and they will normally be implemented in future versions : RTL languages, such as Arabic, Hebrew or Syriac, are not correctly processed: they are extracted from left to right Only JPEG images are currently supported There is currently no support for password-protected files note that I'm not intending to develop a password cracker, just a feature that allows you to extract text contents from a password-encrypted PDF file, if you supply the correct password Digitally signed files are not currently supported Text contents may sometimes show badly translated characters.

The reason why will be explained in the next series of articles The extracted text contents may not exactly reflect text positioning on the page. This is especially true regarding PDF files that contain data in tabular format.