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PHP Text Extractor

Developed and maintained by IntrAgile Kft.

Extract plain text from PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenDocument, RTF, HTML, CSV and images with one call, for search indexes, RAG pipelines and archives.

Magyar nyelvű leírás → README.hu.md · Laravel? → intragile/laravel-text-extractor

• No Composer dependencies. DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, ODT, ODS and ODP are read with PHP's own ZipArchive and XMLReader; PDF and OCR use the standard pdftotext and tesseract tools.
• Bounded memory. Office files are streamed from the zip and read node by node, never loaded whole; spreadsheet strings and the output are capped; HTML, which needs a DOM, has its own size limit; external tools run with a timeout and, on Linux, a per-process memory cap, so one huge scan cannot take your worker down.
• A result that tells "no text" from "failed". A photo without text is a success with empty text, not an error, and a timeout is never mistaken for an empty file. Batch jobs can retry exactly the files worth retrying.
• Safe on untrusted uploads. Zip bombs are stopped on the bytes actually decompressed (not the sizes the file claims), external DTDs are never loaded and inline DTDs are refused (no XXE), and file names never reach a shell unquoted.
• Content-based detection. A PDF called notes.txt is read as a PDF.
• PHP 8.1+, framework-free.

Installation

Requires ext-mbstring. Install what your formats need:

A missing extension or tool never throws: files of that format come back as Failed with reason missing_extension or missing_tool.

Results

extract(), extractFromString() and extractFromStream() always return an IntrAgile\TextExtractor\Result and never throw for problems with the input.

Input

Binary formats are recognised by their content, so a PDF called notes.txt is still a PDF. The file name chooses between TXT, Markdown, CSV, TSV, JSON, XML and HTML for text content, and it catches broken uploads: an empty or text-only file named .pdf, .docx, .png etc. is NotExtractable/corrupt, not an empty text file. Without ext-zip it also tells which Office format a zip container is meant to be.

What you get per format

Tables in DOCX, PPTX, ODT, ODP and HTML come out like spreadsheet rows: one row per line, cells separated by a tab, paragraphs inside a cell joined by a space.

Options

$options->with(['maxOutputBytes' => 1_000_000]) returns a modified copy.

Custom extractors

Implement IntrAgile\TextExtractor\Contracts\Extractor and register it; it is tried before the built-in extractors.

Return raw text; normalisation, the output cap and the empty-text check are applied for you. Throw IntrAgile\TextExtractor\Exception\CorruptInput for a damaged file (NotExtractable/corrupt); any other exception becomes Failed/internal_error.

Security

The package is meant for untrusted uploads:

• Zip bombs. Every zip entry is read through a counting stream; decompression stops at maxArchiveEntryBytes / maxArchiveTotalBytes even when the file lies about its sizes. Entry names with .. or absolute paths are never read.
• XML. Network access, DTD loading and entity substitution are off. A DOCTYPE that only names an external DTD (as in an Apple plist) is accepted, because that DTD is never loaded; a DOCTYPE with an inline subset, where entities could be declared, is refused as corrupt. Paths are passed to libxml as escaped file:// URIs, so %41 or php:// in a file name is never interpreted.
• External tools. Commands are built from argument arrays and the input path is always absolute, so it can never be read as an option. While the memory cap is on (the default), the tool is started through /bin/sh -c 'ulimit -v …; exec …' with every argument single-quoted, so the shell only applies the limit; the kernel enforces it on Linux. On Windows, or with processMemoryMb: 0, no shell is involved. Each run has a timeout, bounded output and its own empty working directory, which is removed afterwards.
• CPU. Parsing done in PHP stops at maxParseSeconds with parse_timeout. The limit is checked between parser steps (every 4096 XML nodes, RTF tokens or HTML nodes, and every 64 KiB of plain text), so it takes effect at the next step: a single libxml call cannot be interrupted. libxml checks duplicate attributes in quadratic time within one read, so a crafted 1 MB start tag can still run for tens of seconds, and parsing an HTML document into a DOM is one call. Run extraction of untrusted files in a queue worker with a job timeout above maxParseSeconds and processTimeout.
• Temporary files are created in sys_get_temp_dir() and deleted in finally blocks.

See SECURITY.md to report a vulnerability.

Compared with

• spatie/pdf-to-text – PDF only; throws on failures, so empty and failed files have to be told apart by the caller.
• vaites/php-apache-tika – broader format coverage, but needs a Java Tika server.
• phpoffice/phpword and friends – full document models for reading and writing; they load the whole document into memory.

License

MIT, see LICENSE.

Developed and maintained by IntrAgile Kft..