A PHP interface for the PdfBox ExtractText utility, useful to unit-test contents of generated PDFs.

• PHP >=5.3 or HHVM
• Java Runtime Environment
• PdfBox JAR file
  • Download: http://pdfbox.apache.org/downloads.html
  • Minimum version: 1.2.0
  • Recommended version: >= 1.8.3
• PHP needs permissions for shell execution

To install with composer:

composer require sgh/pdfbox

use SGH\PdfBox\PdfBox;

//$pdf = GENERATED_PDF;
$converter = new PdfBox;
$converter->setPathToPdfBox('/usr/bin/pdfbox-app-1.7.0.jar');
$text = $converter->textFromPdfStream($pdf);
$html = $converter->htmlFromPdfStream($pdf);
$dom  = $converter->domFromPdfStream($pdf);

If the source PDF is a file, use xxxFromPdfFile() instead xxxFromPdfStream() with the source path as parameter.

If you want to save the converted output to a file, specify the destination path as second parameter of the xxxFromPdfxxx() methods.

Convert a range of pages instead of the full document:

$converter->getOptions()
    ->setStartPage(2)
	->setEndPage(5);

Ignore corrupt objects in the PDF:

$converter->getOptions()
    ->setForce(true);

Sort text:

$converter->getOptions()
    ->setSort(true);

Set path to java executable (if not in path):

$converter->setPathToJava("/path/to/java/bin/java");

To run the unit tests, change the environment variable PDFBOX_JAR to the full path of your PdfBox JAR file. See phpunit.xml.dist.