Full-Text Search

What is Full-Text Search?

PDF documents consist of many parts with the textual content often being the most important. Text search, and text extraction, are two common tasks required by both PDF developers as well the end users of PDF software. In order to search for text in a document, the text content must first be extracted from the PDF which can be difficult without our SDK!

Using an index allows a document to be searched quickly as the text extraction phase only needs to be completed once. This allows the search operation to be scaled up to allow searching of large sets of documents.

Simplifying the search process with PDF SDK

PDF SDK offers the fastest text search technology in the market. The biggest challenge with text searching is in the way the PDF format organizes text, and more specifically text objects. The logic doesn’t restrict those objects (or characters) based on the location, size or rotation angle to be displayed. This also applies to the page, line or word the character would then belong to when you eventually read it.

Although challenging, when a library handles the logic well like Foxit PDF SDK, this is very useful. You can find words anywhere in your document and customize the engine to account for common issues. These issues include split words (for example, with a hyphen at the end of a line) and certain combined characters (for example, the fi character instead of separate f and i), and words of a phrase on different lines, and so on.

Full-text search makes searching and text extraction easier and faster. This applies to every single piece of text in the document according to the index of the text object. This overcomes language and any types of document or encoding. We do this by using an SQLite database to check all the content, which returns a very quick response to your query

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Sample Code

Full-Text Search

public static void doFullTextSearch(String[] args) throws PDFException {
	// createResultFolder(output_path);
	// Initialize library
	int error_code = Library.initialize(sn, key);
	if (error_code != e_ErrSuccess) {
		System.out.println("Library Initialize Error: " + error_code);
		return;
	}
	String directory = "A search directory...";
	FullTextSearch search = new FullTextSearch();
	try {
		String dbPath = "The path of data base to store the indexed data...";
		search.setDataBasePath(dbPath);
		// Get document source information.
		DocumentsSource source = new DocumentsSource(directory);
	 
		// Create a Pause callback object implemented by users to pause the updating process.
		PauseUtil pause = new PauseUtil(30);
	 
		// Start to update the index of PDF files which receive from the source.
		Progressive progressive = search.startUpdateIndex(source, pause, false);
		int state = Progressive.e_ToBeContinued;
		while (state == Progressive.e_ToBeContinued) {
			state = progressive.resume();
		}
	 
		// Create a callback object which will be invoked when a matched one is found.
		MySearchCallback searchCallback = new MySearchCallback();
	 
		// Search the specified keyword from the indexed data source.
		search.searchOf("looking for this text", RankMode.e_RankHitCountASC, searchCallback);
	} catch (PDFException e) {
		e.printStackTrace();
	}
		
		Library.release();
	}
}