How to convert PDF to text so that I can parse this text using PHP?

Question

I have PDF files that are basically just formatted, and I want to parse text using PHP. I understand that the PDF file is binary, so I need a utility or library to convert it to text.

Any recommendations?

Answer 1

I ended up using XPDF (which includes pdftotext). This works great, and I use it in production to extract text from millions of PDF files uploaded to our servers.

The following is the installation process for Linux CentOS:

• download version 3.03 from here: http://foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html
• tar -zxvf xpdfbin-linux-3.03.tar.gz (extract tar.gz)
• create the necessary directories for installation (some or all of them may already exist)
  • sudo mkdir / usr / local / man /
  • sudo mkdir / usr / local / man / man1 /
  • sudo mkdir / usr / local / man / man5 /
  • sudo mkdir / usr / local / etc / xpdfrc /
• move files from extracted folders (cd to the folder where xpdf was simply unpacked)
  • move all executables from the bin64 directory (xpdf, pdftotext ... all files) to / usr / local / bin /
  • move the sample-xpdfrc file to / usr / local / etc / xpdfrc (this can be used as is)
  • move the manual pages from the doc directory (* .1 to / usr / local / man / man1 / and * .5 to / usr / local / man / man 5 /)
• xpdf must be installed and ready to use
• you can delete the downloaded tar.gz file and the folder in which it was unpacked.

Answer 2

Third-party software can download the text content of a PDF file, for example:

• xdoc2txt (Windows only, used in WinMerge plugins)
• pdftotext, part of xpdf

Answer 3

You cannot do this with file_get_contents() , because PDF files contain only binary data (without plain text). To read / modify the PDF file, you can use some third-party libraries. Take a look at:

• http://www.fpdf.org/
• http://www.setasign.de/products/pdf-php-solutions/fpdi/

And don't forget

• http://php.net/manual/en/book.pdf.php