How to extract text from a PDF using PDFKit
PDFKit comes with a built-in class called PDFDocument, which allows us to load and parse PDF documents. It’s used when you want to put your PDF into a PDFView, but it’s also useful when you just want to read text from the PDF: you can loop over each page in the PDF, read its attributedString property, then append it to an attributed string containing all the text from the PDF.
Here’s some example code to do just that:
if let pdf = PDFDocument(url: url) {
let pageCount = pdf.pageCount
let documentContent = NSMutableAttributedString()
for i in 1 ..< pageCount {
guard let page = pdf.page(at: i) else { continue }
guard let pageContent = page.attributedString else { continue }
documentContent.append(pageContent)
}
}It’s an attributed string, so it will retain formatting from the PDF as best as it can.
Available from iOS 11.0 – learn more in my book Advanced iOS: Volume Two
Did this solution work for you? Please pass it on!
Other people are reading…
- How to parse JSON using SwiftyJSON
- How to make empty UITableViews look more attractive using DZNEmptyDataSet
- How to get a Cover Flow effect on iOS
- How to convert speech to text using SFSpeechRecognizer
- What is CloudKit?
About the Swift Knowledge Base
This is part of the Swift Knowledge Base, a free, searchable collection of solutions for common iOS questions.
