Scanning a pdf document

[ajcalvert]

Hello everyone

Ive created a local intranet site which enables our employees to search for a document in a particular folder. The PHP script lists all the file names in an array as so the user can query that array with any keywords relating to the document they are searching for.

This is all well and good, but i would rather be able to search the content of the document for keywords rather than search the document name.

Any ideas as to how to search the content of a pdf document?

Many thanks in advance

[rafadc]

PHP does not have the neccesary functions to search inside a PDF file. You must write that functions using C extension capabilities of PHP.

[ajcalvert]

boo....

....thanks anyway

[herve]

One solution might be : opening PDF file as a regular file (with fopen() ), search through it
with strings search PHP functions, and then display a list of corresponding PDF files.

But it's obvious it can be really really slow, depending of number of files.

Instead, you can, at creation time, insert into a MySQL database keywords
corresponding to the newly created PDF file. When searching, it will just be
a "SELECT" statement inside an SQL database, which is really fast.

Something like this :

Table "files" :

+----+----------------------+
| id |          url         |
+----+----------------------+
|  1 | /files/pdf/file1.pdf |
|  2 | /files/pdf/file2.pdf |
|  3 | /files/pdf/file3.pdf |
|... | ...                  |
+----+----------------------+

Table "keywords" :

+----+---------+
| id | keyword |
+----+---------+
|  1 | cat     |
|  2 | dog     |
|  3 | fish    |
|... | ...     |
+----+---------+

Table of relation between files & keywords :

Table "rel_kw_files":

+---------+------------+
| id_file | id_keyword |
+---------+------------+
|    1    |     1      |
|    1    |     2      |
|    2    |     1      |
|    2    |     3      |
|   ...   |    ...     |
+---------+------------+

Which mean that :

• file number 1 (/files/pdf/files1.pdf)
  is related to keywords number 1 & 2 (cat & dog)

• file number 2 (/files/pdf/files2.pdf)
  is related to keywords number 1 & 3 (cat & fish)

To get the list of files corresponding to a
' $search_keyword ' (input via a HTML form) :

SELECT url
       FROM files,keywords,rel_kw_files
       WHERE (keywords.keyword = '$search_keyword') AND
             (rel_kw_files.id_keyword = keywords.id) AND
             (rel_kw_files.id_file = files.id)

[ajcalvert]

nice one herve!!

cheers all