In this tutorial, we will introduce the way to extract text from a pdf file in java, we will use Tika PDFParser to implment it.

1. Import packages

import java.io.IOException;  
import java.io.InputStream;  
import org.apache.tika.exception.TikaException;  
import org.apache.tika.metadata.Metadata;  
import org.apache.tika.parser.ParseContext;  
import org.apache.tika.parser.pdf.PDFParser;  
import org.apache.tika.sax.BodyContentHandler;  
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;

2. Create a pdf handler ,pdf parser, pdf metadata parser and a context parser object

BodyContentHandler handler   = new BodyContentHandler();  
PDFParser parser             = new PDFParser();  
Metadata metadata            = new Metadata();  
ParseContext pcontext        = new ParseContext();

3. Start to extract text and metadata from a pdf file

parser.parse(stream, handler, metadata, pcontext);  
  
System.out.println("Document Content:" + handler.toString());  
  
System.out.println("Document Metadata:");  
  
String[] metadatas = metadata.names();   
  
for(String data : metadatas) {  
  
    System.out.println(data + ":   " + metadata.get(data));    
  
}

Finally, we add all codes above to a java class.

import java.io.IOException;  
  
import java.io.InputStream;  
  
import org.apache.tika.exception.TikaException;  
  
import org.apache.tika.metadata.Metadata;  
  
import org.apache.tika.parser.ParseContext;  
  
import org.apache.tika.parser.pdf.PDFParser;  
  
import org.apache.tika.sax.BodyContentHandler;  
  
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;  
  
public class PdfParserExample {  
  
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException, SAXException, TikaException {  
  
         BodyContentHandler handler   = new BodyContentHandler();  
  
         PDFParser parser             = new PDFParser();  
  
         Metadata metadata            = new Metadata();  
  
         ParseContext pcontext        = new ParseContext();  
  
         try (
         InputStream stream = AutoDetectParseExample.class.getResourceAsStream("java.pdf"){  
  
         parser.parse(stream, handler, metadata, pcontext);  
  
         System.out.println("Document Content:" + handler.toString());  
  
         System.out.println("Document Metadata:");  
  
         String[] metadatas = metadata.names();   
  
         for(String data : metadatas) {  
  
             System.out.println(data + ":   " + metadata.get(data));    
  
         }  
  
         }catch(Exception e) {System.out.println("Exception message: "+ e.getMessage());}  
  
       }  
  
    }