Node.js Tutorial to Parse & Extract Text & Tables From PDF Document Using pdfreader Library in Javascript

Welcome folks today in this blog post we will be extracting and parse text and tables from pdf document using pdfreader library in javascript. All the full source code of the application is shown below.

Get Started

In order to get started you need to make a new node.js project using the npm command

npm init -y

And now you need to install the below libraries using the below command as shown below

npm i pdfreader

And after that you need to create the index.js file and copy paste the following code. And now we need to go to package.json file and add the type to module as shown below

package.json

index.js

import { PdfReader } from "pdfreader";

new PdfReader().parseFileItems("file.pdf", (err, item) => {
  if (err) console.error("error:", err);
  else if (!item) console.warn("end of file");
  else if (item.text) console.log(item.text);
});

import { PdfReader } from "pdfreader";

new PdfReader().parseFileItems("file.pdf", (err, item) => {

if (err) console.error("error:", err);

else if (!item) console.warn("end of file");

else if (item.text) console.log(item.text);

});

As you can see we are importing the pdfreader library at the top and then we are passing the path of the pdf file and then we are returning the contents of the pdf file in the terminal.

Parsing a password-protected PDF file

We can even parse the contents of the password protected pdf file as shown below

import { PdfReader } from "pdfreader";

new PdfReader({ password: "YOUR_PASSWORD" }).parseFileItems(
  "test/sample-with-password.pdf",
  function (err, item) {
    if (err) console.error(err);
    else if (!item) console.warn("end of file");
    else if (item.text) console.log(item.text);
  }
);

import { PdfReader } from "pdfreader";

new PdfReader({ password: "YOUR_PASSWORD" }).parseFileItems(

"test/sample-with-password.pdf",

function (err, item) {

if (err) console.error(err);

else if (!item) console.warn("end of file");

else if (item.text) console.log(item.text);

}

);

As you can see in the above code we are providing the password property and then we are providing the parseFileItems() method to get the text contents of the pdf file and then we are printing the text content on the command line.

Raw PDF reading from a PDF buffer

We can even read the content of the pdf file from the buffer and then print the text content inside the terminal as shown below

import fs from "fs";
import { PdfReader } from "pdfreader";

fs.readFile("test/sample.pdf", (err, pdfBuffer) => {
  // pdfBuffer contains the file content
  new PdfReader().parseBuffer(pdfBuffer, (err, item) => {
    if (err) console.error("error:", err);
    else if (!item) console.warn("end of buffer");
    else if (item.text) console.log(item.text);
  });
});

import fs from "fs";

import { PdfReader } from "pdfreader";

fs.readFile("test/sample.pdf", (err, pdfBuffer) => {

// pdfBuffer contains the file content

new PdfReader().parseBuffer(pdfBuffer, (err, item) => {

if (err) console.error("error:", err);

else if (!item) console.warn("end of buffer");

else if (item.text) console.log(item.text);

});