C# Extract text from PDF using PdfSharp

der_chirurg picture der_chirurg · Apr 13, 2012 · Viewed 42k times · Source

Is there a possibility to extract plain text from a PDF-File with PdfSharp? I don't want to use iTextSharp because of its license.

Answer

Ronnie Overby picture Ronnie Overby · Jun 4, 2014

Took Sergio's answer and made some extension methods. I also changed the accumulation of strings into an iterator.

public static class PdfSharpExtensions
{
    public static IEnumerable<string> ExtractText(this PdfPage page)
    {       
        var content = ContentReader.ReadContent(page);      
        var text = content.ExtractText();
        return text;
    }   

    public static IEnumerable<string> ExtractText(this CObject cObject)
    {   
        if (cObject is COperator)
        {
            var cOperator = cObject as COperator;
            if (cOperator.OpCode.Name== OpCodeName.Tj.ToString() ||
                cOperator.OpCode.Name == OpCodeName.TJ.ToString())
            {
                foreach (var cOperand in cOperator.Operands)
                    foreach (var txt in ExtractText(cOperand))
                        yield return txt;   
            }
        }
        else if (cObject is CSequence)
        {
            var cSequence = cObject as CSequence;
            foreach (var element in cSequence)
                foreach (var txt in ExtractText(element))
                    yield return txt;
        }
        else if (cObject is CString)
        {
            var cString = cObject as CString;
            yield return cString.Value;
        }
    }
}