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Home Interviews How do you extract text content from a PDF or DOCX file in C#? – MindStick
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1 Answers

ICSM Computer
ICSM Computer 18 May 2025
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To extract text content from a PDF or DOCX file in C#, you can use dedicated libraries designed for parsing each format.

Extracting Text from a PDF

Recommended Library: PdfPig (free and open-source)

Install-Package UglyToad.PdfPig

Example:

using UglyToad.PdfPig;
using UglyToad.PdfPig.Content;
using System;

public static class PdfTextExtractor
{
    public static void ExtractText(string filePath)
    {
        using var document = PdfDocument.Open(filePath);
        foreach (Page page in document.GetPages())
        {
            string text = page.Text;
            Console.WriteLine(text);
        }
    }
}

Alternative Libraries:

  1. iTextSharp (not free for commercial use)
  2. PdfSharp (limited text extraction)

Extracting Text from a DOCX File

Recommended Library: Open XML SDK (from Microsoft)

Install-Package DocumentFormat.OpenXml

Example:

using DocumentFormat.OpenXml.Packaging;
using DocumentFormat.OpenXml.Wordprocessing;
using System;
using System.Linq;

public static class DocxTextExtractor
{
    public static string ExtractText(string filePath)
    {
        using var wordDoc = WordprocessingDocument.Open(filePath, false);
        var body = wordDoc.MainDocumentPart.Document.Body;
        return body.InnerText;
    }
}

Notes

  1. For PDFs with images/scanned content, you'll need OCR tools like Tesseract.NET.
  2. For DOC files (old .doc format), use Microsoft.Office.Interop.Word (requires Word installed) or Aspose.Words (commercial).
  3. Would you like to extract metadata (author, title) or just plain text?
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