履带阅读pdf

Question

i am trying to create a crawler that can read a pdf and extract certain information from it (to save in a database).

However, i am unsure which method / Tool to use.

My initial thought was to use PhantomJs but after reading a lot it doesn't seem that it has the capabilities. if I wanted to use Phantomjs I would have to download the pdf, convert it into an HTML page and then afterwards crawl it using Phantom which seems like a tedious task that should be able to be done faster.

So my question is, how can I read a pdf from an online source and gather these pieces of information?

Answer 1

If you are not limited in terms of programming language, consider using iText. It can easily extract all the text from a given PDF document. It also offer utility methods to look for regular expressions within a file, giving you back the exact location (coordinates) and the matching text.

iText is available both for c# and java lovers.

File inputFile = new File("");
PdfDocument pdfDocument = new PdfDocument(new PdfReader(inputFile));
String content = PdfTextExtractor.getTextFromPage(pdfDocument.getPage(1));

Have a look at the website to learn more. http://developers.itextpdf.com/content/itext-7-examples/itext-7-content-extraction-and-redaction