PDF verification is pretty rare case in automation testing. Still it could happen.

iTextSharp

iTextSharp is a library that allows you to manipulate PDF files. We need very small of this library. It has build in reader that iterates through pages and returns only text.

using iTextSharp.text.pdf;
using iTextSharp.text.pdf.parser;
using System.Text;

namespace PDFExtractor
{
    public class PDFExtractor
    {
        public static string ExtractTextFromPDF(string pdfFileName)
        {
            StringBuilder result = new StringBuilder();
            // Create a reader for the given PDF file
            using (PdfReader reader = new PdfReader(pdfFileName))
            {
                // Read pages
                for (int page = 1; page <= reader.NumberOfPages; page++)
                {
                    SimpleTextExtractionStrategy strategy =
                        new SimpleTextExtractionStrategy();
                    string pageText =
                        PdfTextExtractor.GetTextFromPage(reader, page, strategy);
                    result.Append(pageText);
                }
            }
            return result.ToString();
        }
    }
}

Verification

Once extracted text can be verified against expected as described in Text verification post.

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Related Posts

• Text verification