How do I convert a PDF to text so I can parse that text with PHP?

Question

I have PDFs that are mostly simply formatted text. I would like to parse the text with PHP. I realize that the PDF is binary so I need a utility or library to convert it to text.

Any recommendations?

Solution 1

I ended up using XPDF ( which includes pdftotext ). This works great and I use it in production to extract text from millions of PDFs being uploaded to our servers.

Below is the install process for Linux CentOS:

1. download version 3.03 from here: http://foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html
2. tar -zxvf xpdfbin-linux-3.03.tar.gz ( extract tar.gz )
3. create required directories for install ( some or all of these might exist already )
   • sudo mkdir /usr/local/man/
   • sudo mkdir /usr/local/man/man1/
   • sudo mkdir /usr/local/man/man5/
   • sudo mkdir /usr/local/etc/xpdfrc/
4. move files from extracted folders ( cd into the folder where xpdf was just unzipped )
   • move all the executables from the bin64 directory (xpdf, pdftotext ... all the files ) to /usr/local/bin/
   • move the sample-xpdfrc file to /usr/local/etc/xpdfrc ( this can be used as is )
   • move the manual pages from the doc directory ( *.1 to /usr/local/man/man1/ & *.5 to /usr/local/man/man5/ )
5. xpdf should be installed and ready to use
6. you can delete the downloaded tar.gz file and the folder where it was unzipped

Solution 2

Third party software can dump the text contents of a PDF file, for example:

• xdoc2txt (Windows-only, used in WinMerge plugins)
• pdftotext, part of Xpdf

Solution 3

You can't do that with file_get_contents() because PDF files contain only binary data (no plain text). To read / modify a pdf file you can use some third-party libraries. Take a look at:

• http://www.fpdf.org/
• http://www.setasign.de/products/pdf-php-solutions/fpdi/

And don't forget

• http://php.net/manual/en/book.pdf.php