How to Extract Text Page by Page with PDFBox

[dave2wave]

I asked ChatGPT: To extract text from a PDF page by page in Java, you can use the Apache PDFBox library. PDFBox is an open-source Java library that provides various functionalities to work with PDF files. You can use it to extract text from individual pages of a PDF document. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to achieve this:

Step 1: Set up your Java project Make sure you have a Java development environment set up and create a new Java project. You can use your preferred IDE or a simple text editor like Notepad++.

Step 2: Add Apache PDFBox dependency Download the latest version of Apache PDFBox JAR from the Apache PDFBox website (https://pdfbox.apache.org/). Add the PDFBox JAR file to your project's classpath.

Step 3: Write Java code to extract text page by page

import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;

import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocument;
import org.apache.pdfbox.text.PDFTextStripper;

public class PDFTextExtractor {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String pdfFilePath = "path/to/your/pdf/file.pdf"; // Replace with the actual path to your PDF file

        try (PDDocument document = PDDocument.load(new File(pdfFilePath))) {
            int totalPages = document.getNumberOfPages();
            PDFTextStripper pdfTextStripper = new PDFTextStripper();

            for (int page = 1; page <= totalPages; page++) {
                pdfTextStripper.setStartPage(page);
                pdfTextStripper.setEndPage(page);

                String pageText = pdfTextStripper.getText(document);
                System.out.println("Page " + page + " text:\n" + pageText);
            }
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

Step 4: Run the code Replace "path/to/your/pdf/file.pdf" in the pdfFilePath variable with the actual path to the PDF file you want to extract text from. Then, run the Java code, and it will extract the text page by page from the PDF and print it to the console.

Remember to handle exceptions properly in a production environment. In this example, we've used a try-with-resources statement to automatically close the PDDocument after processing, but you can add appropriate exception handling for more robust applications.

Make sure you comply with the licensing terms of the Apache PDFBox library and respect any copyright or usage restrictions for the PDF files you're working with.

[dave2wave]

Additional thoughts: One approach for PDFs might be to use a PDFSplitter - https://pdfbox.apache.org/2.0/commandline.html For Excel and some of Office formats there are SAX Streaming low memory techniques. https://poi.apache.org/components/spreadsheet/ Tika usage examples: https://tika.apache.org/2.8.0/examples.html