Extract text from documents Leave feedback

GroupDocs.Parser allows to extract text from PDF, Emails, Ebooks, Microsoft Office formats: Word (DOC, DOCX), PowerPoint (PPT, PPTX), Excel (XLS, XLSX), LibreOffice formats and many others (see the full list in the supported document formats article).

GroupDocs.Parser’s text extractor is easy to use and powerful at the same time (to resolve complex scenarios see the advanced usage section).

This article demonstrates how to implement the simplest scenario - extract text from any supported format without additional settings.

To extract text from documents simply call the getText() method of the Parser class:

parser.getText(); // returns TextReader or null

This method returns an instance of the TextReader class with an extracted text, or null if text extraction isn’t supported for the document.

TextReader has the following members:

Here are the steps to extract a text from the document:

• Instantiate the Parser object for the initial document;
• Call the getText() method and obtain the TextReader object;
• Check if reader isn’t null (text extraction is supported for the document);
• Read a text from reader;
• Close the reader and the parser.

The following example shows how to extract a text from a document:

const groupdocs = require('@groupdocs/groupdocs.parser');

// Create an instance of Parser class
const parser = new groupdocs.Parser('sample.pdf');
try {
  // Extract a text into the reader
  const reader = parser.getText();
  // If text extraction isn't supported, a reader is null
  if (reader === null) {
    console.log("Text extraction isn't supported");
  } else {
    try {
      // Print a text from the document
      console.log(reader.readToEnd());
    } finally {
      reader.close();
    }
  }
} finally {
  parser.close();
}

process.exit(0);

Note

process.exit(0) is required at the end of a standalone script because the embedded JVM keeps the Node.js process alive.

To learn more about document data extraction features and get familiar how to extract text, images, forms and more, please refer to the advanced usage section.

Along with the full-featured library we provide simple, but powerful free Apps.

You are welcome to extract data from PDF, DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, XLS, XLSX, Emails and more with our free online Free Online Document Parser App.