Apache Tika can get the plain text from so many formats like Microsoft's Office files and PDF etc.
The tika app jar file can output plain text from those files and print them into a file or console.
This is a sample java program that uses this tika jar file as library and uses the Parser Api to get the text into a String object.
TextExtractor.java
import java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.OutputStream;
import java.io.OutputStreamWriter;
import java.net.URL;
import org.apache.tika.detect.DefaultDetector;
import org.apache.tika.detect.Detector;
import org.apache.tika.io.TikaInputStream;
import org.apache.tika.metadata.Metadata;
import org.apache.tika.parser.AutoDetectParser;
import org.apache.tika.parser.ParseContext;
import org.apache.tika.parser.Parser;
import org.apache.tika.sax.BodyContentHandler;
import org.xml.sax.ContentHandler;
class TextExtractor {
private OutputStream outputstream;
private ParseContext context;
private Detector detector;
private Parser parser;
private Metadata metadata;
private String extractedText;
public TextExtractor() {
context = new ParseContext();
detector = new DefaultDetector();
parser = new AutoDetectParser(detector);
context.set(Parser.class, parser);
outputstream = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
metadata = new Metadata();
}
public void process(String filename) throws Exception {
URL url;
File file = new File(filename);
if (file.isFile()) {
url = file.toURI().toURL();
} else {
url = new URL(filename);
}
InputStream input = TikaInputStream.get(url, metadata);
ContentHandler handler = new BodyContentHandler(outputstream);
parser.parse(input, handler, metadata, context);
input.close();
}
public void getString() {
//Get the text into a String object
extractedText = outputstream.toString();
//Do whatever you want with this String object.
System.out.println(extractedText);
}
public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception {
if (args.length == 1) {
TextExtractor textExtractor = new TextExtractor();
textExtractor.process(args[0]);
textExtractor.getString();
} else {
throw new Exception();
}
}
}
Compile:
javac -cp ".:tika-app-1.0.jar" TextExtractor.java
Run:
java -cp ".:tika-app-1.0.jar" TextExtractor SomeWordDocument.doc
Note: Replace ":" with ";" if you are in Windows