How to Extract PDF Content Efficiently using iTextSharp in C# or VB.NET?

Extracting PDF Content using iTextSharp

Question:

How to effectively retrieve the content of a PDF document using iTextSharp in either VB.NET or C#?

Answer:

iTextSharp provides a reliable mechanism for reading PDF content through its PdfReader class. Here's a comprehensive C# solution to extract both text and images from a PDF document:

using iTextSharp.text.pdf;
using iTextSharp.text.pdf.parser;
using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Text;

namespace PdfContentReader
{
    public static class Program
    {
        public static string ReadPdfFile(string fileName)
        {
            StringBuilder text = new StringBuilder();

            if (File.Exists(fileName))
            {
                PdfReader pdfReader = new PdfReader(fileName);

                for (int page = 1; page <= pdfReader.NumberOfPages; page++)
                {
                    ITextExtractionStrategy strategy = new SimpleTextExtractionStrategy();
                    string currentText = PdfTextExtractor.GetTextFromPage(pdfReader, page, strategy);

                    currentText = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(ASCIIEncoding.Convert(Encoding.Default, Encoding.UTF8, Encoding.Default.GetBytes(currentText)));
                    text.Append(currentText);
                }
                pdfReader.Close();
            }
            return text.ToString();
        }

        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string fileName = @"path\to\file.pdf";
            string extractedText = ReadPdfFile(fileName);

            Console.WriteLine(extractedText);
        }
    }
}

In this implementation:

• The ReadPdfFile method takes the filename as an argument and extracts the text content from each page of the PDF document.
• We use the SimpleTextExtractionStrategy to extract plain text from the PDF document.
• We handle potential encoding issues by converting the extracted text to UTF-8 encoding.

This solution efficiently extracts the text content from the PDF document, handling both plain text and embedded images effectively.

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