How to read table from PDF using itextsharp?

Question

I am having an problem with reading a table from pdf file. It's a very simple pdf file with some text and a table. The tool i am using is itextsharp. I know there is no table concept in PDF. After some googling, someone said it might be possible to achieve that using itextsharp + custom ITextExtractionStrategy. But I have no idea how to start it. Can someone please give me some hints? or a small piece of sample code?

Cheers

Answer 1

This code is for reading a table content. all the values are enclosed by ()Tj, so we look for all the values, you can do anything then with the string resulst.

    string _filePath = @"~\MyPDF.pdf";
    public List<String> Read()
    {
        var pdfReader = new PdfReader(_filePath);
        var pages = new List<String>();

        for (int i = 0; i < pdfReader.NumberOfPages; i++)
        {
            string textFromPage = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(Encoding.Convert(Encoding.Default, Encoding.UTF8, pdfReader.GetPageContent(i + 1)));

            pages.Add(GetDataConvertedData(textFromPage));
        }

        return pages;
    }

    string GetDataConvertedData(string textFromPage)
    {
        var texts = textFromPage.Split(new[] { "\n" }, StringSplitOptions.None)
                                .Where(text => text.Contains("Tj")).ToList();

        return texts.Aggregate(string.Empty, (current, t) => current + 
                   t.TrimStart('(')
                    .TrimEnd('j')
                    .TrimEnd('T')
                    .TrimEnd(')'));
    }