java - 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();
}

---

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.

---

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