How Can I Accurately Extract Persian or Arabic Text from PDFs Using iTextSharp?

Accurately read PDF content

When working with PDF files, accurate content extraction is crucial. However, certain character encodings can pose challenges, especially when working with non-English text. This article explores extracting Persian or Arabic text from PDF using iTextSharp.

Problem: Encoding mismatch

The original code snippet provided attempts to read PDF content using iTextSharp. However, when dealing with non-English text, the results are often garbled. The problem stems from an encoding mismatch during byte to string conversion.

Solution: Remove transcoding

The solution lies in removing the encoding conversion line from the code, which attempts to convert the bytes from the default encoding to UTF-8. This conversion is unnecessary and may cause errors. By eliminating this line, the code correctly processes the text as Unicode.

The following is the corrected code:

public string ReadPdfFile(string fileName)
{
    StringBuilder text = new StringBuilder();

    if (File.Exists(fileName))
    {
        PdfReader pdfReader = new PdfReader(fileName);

        for (int page = 1; page <= pdfReader.NumberOfPages; page++)
        {
            text.Append(pdfReader.GetPlainText(page));
        }
    }

    return text.ToString();
}

Other notes

In addition to solving encoding issues, it is also critical to ensure that text display applications support Unicode. It's also worth checking that you're using the latest version of iTextSharp.

Conclusion

iTextSharp can accurately extract non-English text from PDFs by eliminating encoding conversion lines. Remember to confirm Unicode support in your display application and use the latest iTextSharp version for best performance. This method will ensure seamless and correct extraction of PDF content in various languages.

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