How to extract text from a PDF using PDFKit
Swift version: 5.0
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.
SPONSOR Tired of wasting time debugging your Swift app? Instabug’s SDK is here to help you minimize your debugging time by providing you with complete device details, network logs, and reproduction steps with every bug report. All data is attached automatically. It only takes a line of code to setup. Get started for free.
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 search your app’s Spotlight index
- How to display PDFs using PDFView
- How to scan NFC tags using Core NFC
- How to make empty UITableViews look more attractive using DZNEmptyDataSet
- How to convert speech to text using SFSpeechRecognizer
About the Swift Knowledge Base
This is part of the Swift Knowledge Base, a free, searchable collection of solutions for common iOS questions.
