How to: Extract Text from a Document

• Apr 23, 2019

Important

You require a license to the DevExpress Office File API or DevExpress Universal Subscription to use these examples in production code. Refer to the DevExpress Subscription page for pricing information.

This tutorial describes how to extract the text of a PDF file at runtime using the PDF Document API.

To extract the text of a PDF file, do the following.

1. Create a PdfDocumentProcessor.
2. To open a PDF file, pass a stream that contains the document data to the PdfDocumentProcessor.LoadDocument method.
3. After the document is loaded, you can extract its plain text using the PdfDocumentProcessor.Text property.

The following code implements this functionality.

Note

A complete sample project is available at https://github.com/DevExpress-Examples/how-to-operate-a-pdf-content-at-runtime-e5025

MainForm.cs

string ExtractTextFromPDF(string filePath) {
    string documentText = "";
    try {
        using (PdfDocumentProcessor documentProcessor = new PdfDocumentProcessor()) {
            documentProcessor.LoadDocument(filePath);
            documentText = documentProcessor.Text;
        }
    }
    catch { }
    return documentText;
}

MainForm.vb

Private Function ExtractTextFromPDF(ByVal filePath As String) As String
    Dim documentText As String = ""
    Try
        Using documentProcessor As New PdfDocumentProcessor()
            documentProcessor.LoadDocument(filePath)
            documentText = documentProcessor.Text
        End Using
    Catch
    End Try
    Return documentText
End Function