Grep pdf

This is somewhat superior to pdfgrep as well, because the standard grep has more features. Take a look at the common resource grep tool crgrep which supports searching within PDF files. It also allows searching other resources like content nested in archives, database tables, image meta-data, POM file dependencies and web resources - and combinations of these including recursive search. I assume you mean tp not convert it on the disk, you can convert them to stdout and then grep it with pdftotext.

Grepping the pdf without any sort of conversion is not a practical approach since PDF is mostly a binary format. Also because some pdf are scans they need to be OCRed first. I wrote a pretty simple way to search all pdfs that cannot be grep ed and OCR them. I noticed if a pdf file doesn't have any font it is usually not searchable.

So knowing this we can use pdffonts. First 2 lines of the pdffonts are the table header, so when a file is searchable has more than two line output, knowing this we can create:. Check this in case you're not using Gnome. It's got a list of CLI pdf viewers. Then you can use grep to find some pattern. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top.

Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. How can I grep in PDF files? Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 11 months ago. Active 6 months ago. Viewed k times. Is there a way to search PDF files using grep, without converting to text first in Ubuntu? Improve this question. Dervin Thunk. Dervin Thunk Dervin Thunk 2, 4 4 gold badges 21 21 silver badges 21 21 bronze badges.

See also Is there some sort of PDF to text -converter? For people comming here via search: If you are willing to convert it first to text files, have a look at How to search contents of multiple pdf files? Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer.

AdminBee This works in mac osx Mavericks as well. Install it using brew. Out of curiosity I checked the source of pdfgrep and it uses poppler to extract strings from the pdf. Almost exactly as wag's answer only pagewise rather than, presumably, the entire document. Though it might be less effective if it goes through every file even if it isn't a PDF. This answer would be easier to use if it explained which bits of the command are meant to copied literally and which are placeholders.

What's pattern? I have no idea upon first reading MarkAmery This answer is unnecessarily complex because he is find. The usage is simply pdfgrep 'pattern' file.

Show 3 more comments. If you have poppler-utils installed default on Ubuntu Desktop , you could "convert" it on the fly and pipe it to grep : pdftotext my. I very much doubt he has a problem with any command that converts to text in any way; there's no reason not to — Michael Mrozek.

However, by convention, tools typically allow you to write to stdout instead of to a file by specifying a - instead. Similarly, some tools would write to stdout by default if you omit such an argument entirely but this is not always possible without creating ambiguity. Show 4 more comments. See the manpage for more infos.

Considering pdfgrep exists see above , a flat "no" is incorrect. JonathanCross, considering the question says "using the power of grep, without converting to text first", a flat "no" is correct. Michael Mrozek I think it would have been better to leave this as a comment or edit in the similar answer you are referring to. Craig Craig 1 1 silver badge 1 1 bronze badge. Here is a quick script for search pdf in the current directory :!

Nico Nico 4 4 bronze badges. Asked 11 years, 8 months ago. Active 9 years, 10 months ago. Viewed 7k times. Improve this question. Sam Sam 7, 19 19 gold badges 57 57 silver badges 96 96 bronze badges. I guess searching via pdftotext is also a viable option linuxjournal. I think it depends a lot on what your actually trying to achieve and this doesn't say much about that. If you're just doing it as a user I was under the impression this wasn't there and hence was looking at the grep command. Add a comment.

Active Oldest Votes. Well, PDF is a binary format, and grep can search binary files as if they were text grep -a or you can just use pdftotext which comes with xpdf like this: pdftotext whee. Improve this answer. Will Hayworth Will Hayworth 1, 10 10 silver badges 22 22 bronze badges.

I am able to get this command working only if a pass a "-" after the file name to be searched. Oh, weird This was the only technique I could find that can actually grep 'notes' within a pdf document. The results were a bit messy, but easy enough to cleanup, and at least the technique works.

Coxy Coxy 8, 4 4 gold badges 37 37 silver badges 61 61 bronze badges. I was just looking for a simple search capability here — Sam. I answered these because these are solutions you might use to do it programmatically. Bozhidar Batsov Bozhidar Batsov Sorry, that is just nonsense! PDF normally uses compressed objects and even if the objects were uncompressed, the text is only partly written in cleartext inside the pdf.

If you have pdftotext installed via the popplar package, then try this perl script :! Jeff Burdges Jeff Burdges 4, 21 21 silver badges 44 44 bronze badges. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name.