Getting indexed documents Leave feedback

This page contains a description of how to get a list of indexed documents from an index, and how to get the text of indexed documents in HTML or plain text format.

To get a list of indexed documents from an index, use the get_indexed_documents method of the Index class. Documents with the extensions ZIP, PST, OST can also contain internal documents. To get a list of internal documents, use the get_indexed_document_items method of the Index class. For ZIP archives, this way you can access documents of arbitrary nesting depth. An example of obtaining a list of documents from an index is presented below.

from groupdocs.search import Index

# Creating an index in the specified folder
index = Index("./index")

# Indexing documents from the specified folder
index.add("./documents")

# Getting list of indexed documents
documents = index.get_indexed_documents()
for document in documents:
    print(document.file_path)
    items = index.get_indexed_document_items(document)  # Getting list of document items
    for item in items:
        print("\t" + item.inner_path)

documents\einstein-biography.txt
documents\letters-archive.zip
	letters\letter-1905.txt
	letters\letter-1915.txt
	readme.txt
documents\relativity-primer.txt

To get a single indexed document, use the get_indexed_document method. It takes the file path of a document indexed from a file (as returned by the DocumentInfo.file_path property, which is a full path) or the key of a document indexed from a stream or a structure, and returns None if there is no such document in the index.

import os

from groupdocs.search import Index

# Creating an index in the specified folder
index = Index("./index")

# Indexing documents from the specified folder
index.add("./documents")

# Getting an indexed document by its file path
document = index.get_indexed_document(os.path.abspath("./documents/einstein-biography.txt"))
if document is not None:
    print(document.file_path + " (" + str(document.file_type) + ")")

documents\einstein-biography.txt (.txt)

The text of an indexed document can be extracted from an index if the option to save the text of documents in the index was enabled. If this option was not enabled when creating an index, then when the get_document_text method of the Index class is called, the text of the document will be extracted from the document again. Details about saving the text of documents in an index can be found on the page Storing text of indexed documents.

The generated text of the document is passed to an instance of a class derived from the abstract class OutputAdapter. Details on the output adapters are presented on the page Output adapters.

After generating the text of a document into a file, this file can be opened by an Internet browser. The following example shows how to extract document text from an index.

import os

from groupdocs.search import Index
from groupdocs.search.common import FileOutputAdapter
from groupdocs.search.options import OutputFormat

# Creating an index in the specified folder
index = Index("./index")

# Indexing documents from the specified folder
index.add("./documents")

# Getting list of indexed documents
documents = index.get_indexed_documents()

# Getting a document text
if len(documents) > 0:
    os.makedirs("./output", exist_ok=True)
    output_adapter = FileOutputAdapter(OutputFormat.HTML, "./output/Text.html")
    index.get_document_text(documents[0], output_adapter)
    print("The text of", os.path.basename(documents[0].file_path), "is saved to ./output/Text.html")

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>documents\einstein-biography.txt</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>documents\einstein-biography.txt</p>
<p></p>
<h3>filename</h3>
[TRUNCATED]

To extract the text of a document from an index, there is also an overload of the method that takes an instance of the TextOptions class as a parameter. In this class, the following options can be specified:

• custom_extractor is a custom extractor used during indexing, it is necessary if the text of the document was not saved in the index;
• additional_fields are additional document fields added during document indexing which are also necessary if the document text was not saved in the index;
• cancellation is an object used to cancel the operation;
• generate_head is a flag to specify whether the Head tag is generated in the output HTML; the default value is True;
• metadata_indexing_options is an object for specifying metadata indexing options. This property and the other properties inherited from the BaseOptions class (for example, encoding, auto_detect_encoding and ocr_indexing_options) specify how the text of the document is extracted; they are necessary if the document text was not saved in the index.

You may easily run the code from documentation articles and see the features in action in our GitHub examples:

• GroupDocs.Search for Python via .NET examples

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

You are welcome to search over your PDF, DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX, XLS, XLSX and more with our free online Free Online Document Search App.