Features Overview Leave feedback

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GroupDocs.Parser is a feature-rich document data parsing API. This page describes its most important features.

GroupDocs.Parser allows to parse documents by user-defined templates.

It is easy to create a template with data field and table definitions. Then pass the Template object to the parseByTemplate(template) method and extract data such as prices, invoice numbers and tables from your typical documents. See Parse data from documents for an example.

GroupDocs.Parser provides several text extraction methods that cover various text retrieval scenarios:

• Extract a plain text from any of the supported documents;
• Extract HTML or Markdown formatted text for a fast preview;
• Extract structured text;
• Extract text areas with coordinates, text style and other info;
• Search a text by a keyword or regular expression; get a text around the found word.

Below different text extraction aspects are described.

One of the most demanded features is accurate text extraction. GroupDocs.Parser allows to easily implement it using the simple getText() method. See Extract text from documents.

GroupDocs.Parser provides a way to increase text extraction performance with Raw text extraction mode for some formats. The text doesn’t look so accurate, but performance is higher.

This feature is useful in those text extraction scenarios when text quality may not be the best, but performance is critical.

In addition to standard text extraction modes, GroupDocs.Parser provides the getFormattedText(options) method to extract a formatted text for those cases when simple plain text is not enough and you need to keep formatting like text style, table layout etc. See Extract formatted text from documents.

At this moment the following formats are supported:

• Plain Text
• Markdown
• HTML

With Plain Text mode GroupDocs.Parser performs formatting in plain text making extracted text look closer to the original. This is achieved due to special text positioning, box-drawing characters etc.

This mode is useful when you need to export the extracted text to any system that supports Markdown-formatted text.

At this moment the following formatting is supported:

• Bold text
• Italic text
• Hyperlinks
• Headings
• Numbering and bullets lists
• Tables

GroupDocs.Parser also supports HTML formatting.

The following HTML tags are supported when extracting text with this formatting mode:

Many document formats do not contain only a text. Usually, the text is organized into paragraphs divided into parts with headers. Also, the text can contain hyperlinks, lists, tables. For this scenario, GroupDocs.Parser provides structured text extraction. Call the getStructure() method that returns an org.w3c.dom.Document object with structured text in XML form.

GroupDocs.Parser provides an API that allows to extract text areas with coordinates and text style.

This feature allows to implement advanced scenarios related to text analytics in your applications. Call the getTextAreas() method and you will get all text area objects.

GroupDocs.Parser allows to search over a loaded document using keywords or regular expressions. Call the search(keyword) method and then loop through the collection of search results.

GroupDocs.Parser allows to extract metadata from supported document formats with a simple getMetadata() method call. See Extract metadata from documents.

GroupDocs.Parser supports image extraction from documents. The getImages() method returns all info about document images and allows to save them. See Extract images from documents.

GroupDocs.Parser allows to extract data (text, images and other supported extraction methods) from formats that contain other documents like ZIP archives, PDF portfolios, emails, OST containers.

Call the getContainer() method and work with extracted attached or archived documents as with usual document files. See Extract data from attachments and ZIP archives.

GroupDocs.Parser allows to parse form data from PDF documents. Call the parseForm() method and iterate through extracted form fields. See Extract data from PDF forms.

GroupDocs.Parser allows to extract table of contents from some document formats. To do it, call the getToc() method. See Extract table of contents.