note 77097 modified in ref.pdf by danbrown

I seriously tried to get PDF parsing to work to use it in the indexing for fulltext search for a document management. But none of the pdf2text functions below worked for my test cases (among them an openoffice generated pdf file and a file generated by fpdf).

But I found a REALLY WORKING SOLUTION! On linux systems, install the XPDF package. It comes with a tool called pdftotext. Use php code similar to the following to get the text content of your pdf files:

<?php
	$file = "test.pdf";
	$outpath = preg_replace("/\.pdf$/", "", $file).".txt";
	
	system("pdftotext ".escapeshellcmd($file), $ret);
	if ($ret == 0)
	{
		$value = file_get_contents($outpath);
		unlink($outpath);
		print $value;
	}
	if ($ret == 127)
		print "Could not find pdftotext tool.";
	if ($ret == 1)
		print "Could not find pdf file.";
?>

The solution works on all test cases and is much more powerful than any of the previous pure php functions posted here, although only available on linux.

--was--
I seriously tried to get PDF parsing to work to use it in the indexing for fulltext search for a document management. But none of the pdf2text functions below worked for my test cases (among them an openoffice generated pdf file and a file generated by fpdf).

But I found a REALLY WORKING SOLUTION! On linux systems, install the XPDF package. It comes with a tool called pdftotext. Use php code similar to the following to get the text content of your pdf files:

<?
	$file = "test.pdf";
	$outpath = preg_replace("/\.pdf$/", "", $file).".txt";
	
	system("pdftotext ".escapeshellcmd($file), $ret);
	if ($ret == 0)
	{
		$value = file_get_contents($outpath);
		unlink($outpath);
		print $value;
	}
	if ($ret == 127)
		print "Could not find pdftotext tool.";
	if ($ret == 1)
		print "Could not find pdf file.";
?>

The solution works on all test cases and is much more powerful than any of the previous pure php functions posted here, although only available on linux.

http://php.net/manual/en/ref.pdf.php