CODEWITHSUNDEEP
parsingtextpdfbox
GoodJuJu
GoodJuJu

Reputation: 1570

Parse Comments / Annotations From PDF Using .NET Version of PDFBox: PDFBox.NET-1.8.9

I am using the following code to parse text from a PDF using the .NET version of PDFBox.

Imports org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel
Imports org.apache.pdfbox.util

Private Shared Function parseUsingPDFBox(ByVal input As String) As String
      Dim doc As PDDocument = Nothing

      Try
        doc = PDDocument.load(input)
        Dim stripper As New PDFTextStripper()
        Return stripper.getText(doc)
      Finally
        If doc IsNot Nothing Then
          doc.close()
        End If
      End Try
    End Function

http://www.squarepdf.net/how-to-convert-pdf-to-text-in-net-vb

The code is extracting the plain visible text, but is not extracting the comments.

I have tried using FDFAnnotation.ToString() But it warns that ToString() is ambiguous...

doc = PDDocument.load(strFilename)
Dim stripper As New FDFAnnotationText
Return stripper.tostring(doc)

I have tried iTextSharp and with this I can extract them using PdfName.ANNOTS class, but wish to stick with PDFBox.

My preferred language is VB, but I am happy to accept answers in C# too.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 608

Answers (1)

mkl
mkl

Reputation: 95928

I assume by "comments" you mean text annotations with Name value Comment. The following code outputs the Contents of all text annotations. If you mean a different annotation kind, you might have to adapt it:

Dim doc As PDDocument = PDDocument.loadNonSeq(New java.io.File("..."), Nothing)
Dim pages As java.util.List = doc.getDocumentCatalog().getAllPages()
For i = 0 To pages.size() - 1
    Dim page As PDPage = pages.get(i)
    Dim annotations As java.util.List = page.getAnnotations()
    For j = 0 To annotations.size() - 1
        Dim annotation As PDAnnotation = annotations.get(j)
        If annotation.getSubtype() = "Text" Then
            Console.WriteLine("{0}-{1} : {2}", i, j, annotation.getContents())
        End If
    Next
Next

doc.close()

Upvotes: 2

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