How to search a PDF file in Java

Mark Stephens

4 years ago

PDF files are not directly supported in Java. This tutorial shows you how to search the text content in a PDF file in simple steps using JPedal Java PDF library. This provides an easy to use Java PDF api to search text in PDF documents from your Java code.

Why use a third-party library to handle PDF files?

PDF files are a very complex binary/text hybrid data structure and the file needs to be decoded to figure out the textual content. In this example, we will use our JPedal Java PDF library to make this task simple.

How to search PDF file in Java

Download JPedal trial jar.
Create a File handle, InputStream or URL pointing to the PDF file
```
FindTextInRectangle extract=new FindTextInRectangle(path);
```
Include a password if file password protected
```
extract.setPassword("password");
```
Open the PDF file
```
if (extract.openPDFFile()) {
```

Scan the pages

  int pageCount = extract.getPageCount();
  for (int page = 1; page <= pageCount; page++) {
    float[] coords = extract.findTextOnPage(page"textToFind", 
          SearchType.MUTLI_LINE_RESULTS ) ;
  }
}

Close the PDF file
```
 extract.closePDFfile();
```

JPedal makes Searching PDF files for text simple

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