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; COSDocument cosDoc = null; File file = new File(filepath);  PDFParser parser = new PDFParser(new FileInputStream(file)); parser.parse(); cosDoc = parser.getDocument(); pdfStripper = new PDFTextStripper(); pdDoc = new PDDocument(cosDoc); pdfStripper.setStartPage(1); pdfStripper.setEndPage(5); String parsedText = pdfStripper.getText(pdDoc); System.out.println(parsedText); 

However, I got the following error:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException at org.apache.fontbox.afm.AFMParser.main(AFMParser.java:304) 

I added pdfbox-1.8.5.jar and fontbox-1.8.5.jar to the class path.

Edit

I added System.out.println("program starts"); to the beginning of the program.

I ran it, then I got the same error as mentioned above and program starts did not appear in the console.

Thus, I think I have a problem with the class path or something.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Using PDFBox 2.0.7, this is how I get the text of a PDF:

static String getText(File pdfFile) throws IOException {     PDDocument doc = PDDocument.load(pdfFile);     return new PDFTextStripper().getText(doc); } 

Call it like this:

try {     String text = getText(new File("/home/me/test.pdf"));     System.out.println("Text in PDF: " + text); } catch (IOException e) {     e.printStackTrace(); } 

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Since user oivemaria asked in the comments:

You can use PDFBox in your application by adding it to your dependencies in build.gradle:

dependencies {   compile group: 'org.apache.pdfbox', name: 'pdfbox', version: '2.0.7' } 

Here's more on dependency management using Gradle.

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If you want to keep the PDF's format in the parsed text, give PDFLayoutTextStripper a try.