How Can I Efficiently Extract Text from PDF Files Using iTextSharp in VB.NET or C#?

Extracting PDF Content with iTextSharp in VB.NET or C

Reading the content of a PDF document can be a common task when building robust and versatile applications. iTextSharp, a powerful open-source library, provides a comprehensive solution for managing PDF documents in your .NET applications.

When it comes to extracting text from PDF files, iTextSharp offers the PdfReader class, a significant tool for text extraction purposes. This class enables you to access individual pages of a PDF document, and with the help of the SimpleTextExtractionStrategy strategy, you can retrieve the plain text content from those pages.

For extracting text from an image-based PDF, iTextSharp leverages OCR engines like Tesseract. These engines recognize and extract text from images, enabling you to capture content from PDFs containing images of text.

Here's an example that demonstrates how to read PDF content using PdfReader in VB.NET or C#:

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

public static class PdfReaderExample
{
    public static string ReadPdfFile(string filePath)
    {
        var sb = new StringBuilder();

        if (File.Exists(filePath))
        {
            var reader = new PdfReader(filePath);

            for (var page = 1; page <= reader.NumberOfPages; page++)
            {
                var strategy = new SimpleTextExtractionStrategy();
                var text = PdfTextExtractor.GetTextFromPage(reader, page, strategy);

                text = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(ASCIIEncoding.Convert(Encoding.Default, Encoding.UTF8, Encoding.Default.GetBytes(text)));
                sb.Append(text);
            }

            reader.Close();
        }

        return sb.ToString();
    }
}

In this example:

• The PdfReader is initialized, allowing access to the PDF document's contents.
• Each page of the PDF is processed using the PdfTextExtractor with the SimpleTextExtractionStrategy.
• The extracted text is converted to UTF-8 encoding for accurate text representation.
• The final extracted text is stored in a string variable and returned as the result.

By utilizing iTextSharp's capabilities, you can effortlessly read the content of your PDF files, empowering your applications with the ability to process and analyze PDF documents.

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