PDFlib Text Extraction Toolkit (TET) Manual

10.9 Text and Metrics Retrieval Functions
C++ wstring get_text(int page)
C# Java String get_text(int page)
Perl PHP string get_text(long page)
VB RB Function get_text(page As Long) As String
C const char *TET_get_text(TET *tet, int page, int *len)
Get the next text fragment from a page’s content.
page A valid page handle obtained with TET_open_page( ).
len (C language binding only) A pointer to a variable which will hold the length of the
returned string depending on the outputformat option of TET_set_option( ):
If outputformat=utf8 the length is reported as number of Unicode characters. The
number of bytes in the null-terminated string (which is identical to the number of 8-bit
code units) can be determined with the strlen( ) function.
If outputformat=utf16 the length is reported as number of 16-bit code units; surrogate
pairs are counted as two code units. The number of bytes in the string is 2*len.
If outputformat=utf32 the length is reported as number of 32-bit code units (which is
identical to the number of Unicode characters). The number of bytes in the string is
4*len.
Returns
Bindings
A string containing the next text fragment on the page. The length of the fragment is
determined by the granularity option of TET_open_page( ). Even for granularity=glyph the
string may contain more than one character (see Section 7.1, »Important Unicode Concepts«,
page 91).
If all text on the page has been retrieved an empty string or null object will be returned
(see below). In this case TET_get_errnum( ) should be called to find out whether
there is no more text because of an error on the page, or because the end of the page has
been reached.
C language binding: the result is provided as null-terminated UTF-8 (default) or UTF-16/
UTF-32 string according to the outputformat option of TET_set_option( ). On i5/iSeries and
zSeries EBCDIC-encoded UTF-8 can also be selected, and is enabled by default. The returned
data buffer can be used until the next call to this function. If no more text is
available a NULL pointer and *len=0 will be returned.
C++ and COM: the result is provided as Unicode string in UTF-16 format (wstring in C++).
If no more text is available an empty string will be returned.
Java, .NET and Objective-C: the result is provided as Unicode string. If no more text is
available a null (nil in Objective-C) object will be returned.
Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby language bindings: the result is provided as UTF-8 (default)
or UTF-16/UTF-32 string according to the outputformat option of TET_set_option( ). In Python
3 UTF-16/UTF-32 results are returned as bytes. If no more text is available a null object
will be returned.
REALbasic: the result is provided as Unicode string. If no more text is available an empty
string will be returned.
10.9 Text and Metrics Retrieval Functions 177