How to: Search Text in a Document

• Mar 20, 2020
• 2 minutes to read

Important

You need a license for the DevExpress Office File API Subscription or DevExpress Universal Subscription to use these examples in production code.

This example demonstrates how to count the occurrences of words in a document text.

To accomplish this task, do the following.

• Create a PdfDocumentProcessor.
• To load a PDF file, pass a file path to the PdfDocumentProcessor.LoadDocument method.

• Call the PdfDocumentProcessor.FindText method with a string parameter containing the text to search in the document.

  After the method returns the results of the search operation, repeat the call until each occurrence of the specified text is found in the document.

  Note

  Alternatively, use an overloaded PdfDocumentProcessor.FindText method to specify additional search parameters, such as case sensitivity and search direction.

  To navigate through the text of the document, use the PdfDocumentProcessor.PrevWord and PdfDocumentProcessor.NextWord methods that return a PdfWord object containing a word located at the current search position.

The code sample below counts all words in a document.

View Example

MainForm.cs

using DevExpress.Pdf;
using DevExpress.XtraBars;
using DevExpress.XtraEditors;
using System.IO;
using System.Text;
using System.Windows.Forms;
// ...
        private int WordCount(string filePath, string word) {
            int count = 0;
            try {
                using (PdfDocumentProcessor documentProcessor = new PdfDocumentProcessor()) {
                    documentProcessor.LoadDocument(filePath);
                    while (documentProcessor.FindText(word).Status == PdfTextSearchStatus.Found) {
                        count++;
                    }
                }
            }
            catch { }

            return count;
        }

MainForm.vb

Imports DevExpress.Pdf
Imports DevExpress.XtraBars
Imports DevExpress.XtraEditors
Imports System.IO
Imports System.Text
Imports System.Windows.Forms
' ...
        Private Function WordCount(ByVal filePath As String, ByVal word As String) As Integer
            Dim count As Integer = 0
            Try
                Using documentProcessor As New PdfDocumentProcessor()
                    documentProcessor.LoadDocument(filePath)
                    Do While documentProcessor.FindText(word).Status = PdfTextSearchStatus.Found
                        count += 1
                    Loop
                End Using
            Catch
            End Try

            Return count
        End Function