使用 PHP 在文件中搜索文本

Question

How to search text in some files like PDF, doc, docs or txt using PHP? I want to do similar function as Full Text Search in MySQL, but this time, I'm directly search through files, not database.

The search will do searching in many files that located in a folder. Any suggestion, tips or solutions for this problem?

I also noticed that, google also do searching through the files.

Answer 1

For searching PDF's you'll need a program like pdftotext, which converts content from a pdf to text. For Word documents a simular thingy could be available (because of all the styling and encryption in Word files).

An example to search through PDF's (copied from one of my scripts (it's a snippet, not the entire code, but it should give you some understanding) where I extract keywords and store matches in a PDF-results-array.):

foreach($keywords as $keyword)
{
    $keyword = strtolower($keyword);
    $file = ABSOLUTE_PATH_SITE."_uploaded/files/Transcripties/".$pdfFiles[$i];

    $content    = addslashes(shell_exec('/usr/bin/pdftotext \''.$file.'\' -'));
    $result     = substr_count(strtolower($content), $keyword);

    if($result > 0)
    {
        if(!in_array($pdfFiles[$i], $matchesOnPDF))
        {
            array_push($matchesOnPDF, array(                                                    
                    "matches"   => $result,
                    "type"      => "PDF",
                    "pdfFile"   => $pdfFiles[$i]));
        }
    }
}

Answer 2

Depending on the file type, you should convert the file to text and then search through it using ie file_get_contents() and str_pos() . To convert files to text, you have - beside others - the following tools available:

• catdoc for word files
• xlhtml for excel files
• ppthtml for powerpoint files
• unrtf for RTF files
• pdftotext for pdf files

Answer 3

If you are under a linux server you may use

grep -R "text to be searched for" ./   // location is everything under the actual directory

called from php using exec resulting in

cmd = 'grep -R "text to be searched for" ./';
$result = exec(grep);
print_r(result);

Answer 4

2021 I came across this and found something so I figure I will link to it...

Note: docx, pdfs and others are not regular text files and require more scripting and/or different libraries to read and/or edit each different type unless you can find an all in one library. This means you would have to script out each different file type you want to search though including a normal text file. If you don't want to script it completely then you have to install each of the libraries you will need for each of the file types you want to read as well. But you still need to script each to handle them as the library functions.

I found the basic answer here on the stack.