Getting java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/pdfbox/pdfparser/

Question

Below is the code that I am using, I've provided one pdf file and one text file as an input to command line.

import org.pdfbox.cos.COSDocument;
import org.pdfbox.pdfparser.PDFParser;
import org.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocument;
import org.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocumentInformation;
import org.pdfbox.util.PDFTextStripper;

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.PrintWriter;

public class PDFTextParser {

    PDFParser parser;
    String parsedText;
    PDFTextStripper pdfStripper;
    PDDocument pdDoc;
    COSDocument cosDoc;
    PDDocumentInformation pdDocInfo;

    // PDFTextParser Constructor 
    public PDFTextParser() {
    }

    // Extract text from PDF Document
    String pdftoText(String fileName) {

        System.out.println("Parsing text from PDF file " + fileName + "....");
        File f = new File(fileName);

        if (!f.isFile()) {
            System.out.println("File " + fileName + " does not exist.");
            return null;
        }

        try {
            parser = new PDFParser(new FileInputStream(f));
        } catch (Exception e) {
            System.out.println("Unable to open PDF Parser.");
            return null;
        }

        try {
            parser.parse();
            cosDoc = parser.getDocument();
            pdfStripper = new PDFTextStripper();
            pdDoc = new PDDocument(cosDoc);
            parsedText = pdfStripper.getText(pdDoc);
        } catch (Exception e) {
            System.out.println("An exception occured in parsing the PDF Document.");
            e.printStackTrace();
            try {
                if (cosDoc != null) cosDoc.close();
                if (pdDoc != null) pdDoc.close();
            } catch (Exception e1) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
            return null;
        }
        System.out.println("Done.");
        return parsedText;
    }

    // Write the parsed text from PDF to a file
    void writeTexttoFile(String pdfText, String fileName) {

        System.out.println("\nWriting PDF text to output text file " + fileName + "....");
        try {
            PrintWriter pw = new PrintWriter(fileName);
            pw.print(pdfText);
            pw.close();  
        } catch (Exception e) {
            System.out.println("An exception occured in writing the pdf text to file.");
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        System.out.println("Done.");
    }

    //Extracts text from a PDF Document and writes it to a text file
    public static void main(String args[]) {

        if (args.length != 2) {
            System.out.println("Usage: java PDFTextParser  ");
            System.exit(1);
        }

        PDFTextParser pdfTextParserObj = new PDFTextParser();
        String pdfToText = pdfTextParserObj.pdftoText(args[0]);

        if (pdfToText == null) {
            System.out.println("PDF to Text Conversion failed.");
        }
        else {
            System.out.println("\nThe text parsed from the PDF Document....\n" + pdfToText);
            pdfTextParserObj.writeTexttoFile(pdfToText, args[1]);
        }
    }
}

After Running this code via command line with 2 inputs one pdf file name and another text file name I am getting noClassDefFound exception. Below is the stack trace.

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/pdfbox/pdfparser/
PDFParser
        at PDFTextParser.pdftoText(PDFTextParser.java:42)
        at PDFTextParser.main(PDFTextParser.java:93)
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.pdfbox.pdfparser.PDFParser
        at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:202)
        at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
        at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:190)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:306)
        at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:301)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:247)
        ... 2 more

After adding class path I am getting below Exceptions

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/fontbox/afm/AFMParser
        at org.pdfbox.pdmodel.font.PDFont.getAFM(PDFont.java:350)
        at org.pdfbox.pdmodel.font.PDFont.getAverageFontWidthFromAFMFile(PDFont.java:313)
        at org.pdfbox.pdmodel.font.PDSimpleFont.getAverageFontWidth(PDSimpleFont.java:231)
        at org.pdfbox.util.PDFStreamEngine.showString(PDFStreamEngine.java:276)
        at org.pdfbox.util.operator.ShowTextGlyph.process(ShowTextGlyph.java:80)
        at org.pdfbox.util.PDFStreamEngine.processOperator(PDFStreamEngine.java:452)
        at org.pdfbox.util.PDFStreamEngine.processSubStream(PDFStreamEngine.java:215)
        at org.pdfbox.util.PDFStreamEngine.processStream(PDFStreamEngine.java:174)
        at org.pdfbox.util.PDFTextStripper.processPage(PDFTextStripper.java:336)
        at org.pdfbox.util.PDFTextStripper.processPages(PDFTextStripper.java:259)
        at org.pdfbox.util.PDFTextStripper.writeText(PDFTextStripper.java:216)
        at org.pdfbox.util.PDFTextStripper.getText(PDFTextStripper.java:149)
        at PDFTextParser.pdftoText(PDFTextParser.java:53)
        at PDFTextParser.main(PDFTextParser.java:93)
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.fontbox.afm.AFMParser
        at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:202)
        at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
        at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:190)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:306)
        at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:301)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:247)
        ... 14 more

Answer 1

When running a program with external dependencies (PDF parser in your case) in Java you have to include the appropriate JAR files to your CLASSPATH.

See this other thread on Stack Overflow or the documentation at Oracle.

I have searched for the classes that cannot be found at jarfinder.com and it turns out you need to include (at least) two different JAR files - the font box and the pdf box JARs.

Answer 2

You can get the fontbox jar from here http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.apache.pdfbox/fontbox/1.8.5

If you're using maven org.apache.pdfbox fontbox 1.8.5

Answer 3

You need to include fontbox-1.3.1 jar in the class path apart from Apache pdfbox jar which will fix your issue as PDFBox internally uses fontbox-1.3.1