Extract text from a pdf

This package provides a class to extract text from a pdf.

use Spatie\PdfToText\Pdf;

echo Pdf::getText('book.pdf'); //returns the text from the pdf

Spatie is a webdesign agency based in Antwerp, Belgium. You'll find an overview of all our open source projects on our website.

Postcardware

You're free to use this package (it's MIT-licensed), but if it makes it to your production environment you are required to send us a postcard from your hometown, mentioning which of our package(s) you are using.

Our address is: Spatie, Samberstraat 69D, 2060 Antwerp, Belgium.

The best postcards will get published on the open source page on our website.

Requirements

Behind the scenes this package leverages pdftotext. You can verify if the binary installed on your system by issueing this command:

which pdftotext

If it is installed it will return the path to the binary.

To install the binary you can use this command on Ubuntu or Debian:

apt-get install poppler-utils

If you're on RedHat or CentOS use this:

yum install poppler-utils

Installation

You can install the package via composer:

composer require spatie/pdf-to-text

Usage

Extracting text from a pdf is easy.

$text = (new Pdf())
    ->setPdf('book.pdf')
    ->text();

Or easier:

echo Pdf::getText('book.pdf');

By default the package will assume that the pdftotext command is located at /usr/bin/pdftotext.
If it is located elsewhere pass its binary path to constructor

$text = (new Pdf('/custom/path/to/pdftotext'))
    ->setPdf('book.pdf')
    ->text();

or as the second parameter to the getText static method:

echo Pdf::getText('book.pdf', '/custom/path/to/pdftotext');

Sometimes you may want to use pdftotext options. To do so you can set them up using the setOptions method.

$text = (new Pdf())
    ->setPdf('table.pdf')
    ->setOptions(['layout', 'r 96'])
    ->text()
;

or as the third parameter to the getText static method:

echo Pdf::getText('book.pdf', null, ['layout', 'opw myP1$$Word']);

Please note that successive calls to setOptions() will overwrite options passed in during previous calls.

If you need to make multiple calls to add options (for example if you need to pass in default options when creating
the Pdf object from a container, and then add context-specific options elsewhere), you can use the addOptions() method:

$text = (new Pdf())
    ->setPdf('table.pdf')
    ->setOptions(['layout', 'r 96'])
    ->addOptions(['f 1'])
    ->text()
;

Change log

Please see CHANGELOG for more information about what has changed recently.

Testing

 composer test

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING for details.

Security

If you discover any security related issues, please email freek@spatie.be instead of using the issue tracker.

Credits

About Spatie