📄 SimpleTextExtract

SimpleTextExtract attempts extract text from various file types and is recommended as a guard before resorting to something more extreme like Apache Tika. It is built specifically with ActiveStorage in mind and originally built for the purpose of extracting text from attachments in order to index the text in ElasticSearch.

SimpleTextExtract andlhes parsing text from:

• .pdf
• .docx
• .doc
• .xlsx
• .xls
• .csv
• .txt 😜

If no text is parsed (for pdf), or a file format is not supported (like images), then "" is returned and you can move on to try an OCR solution. For example, at Govly use SimpleTextExtract before sending files to AWS Textract.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "simple_text_extract"

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install simple_text_extract

Text can be parsed from raw file content or files in the filesystem t by calling SimpleTextExtract.extract:

# filesystem
extract = SimpleTextExtract.extract(filepath: "path_to_file.pdf")

# raw
extract = SimpleTextExtract.extract(filename: "some_file.raw", raw: "raw contents")

# tempfile
extract = SimpleTextExtract.extract(tempfile: temp_file)



# using ActiveStorage >= 6
extract = attachment.open { |tmp| SimpleTextExtract.extract(tempfile: tmp) }

# raw file content or when ActiveStorage < 6
extract = SimpleTextExtract.extract(filename: attachment.blob.filename, raw: attachment.download)

You can choose to use SimpleTextExtract without the following dependencies, but it won't work for specific file types:

pdf parsing requires poppler-utils doc parsing requires antiword

• brew install poppler
• brew install antiword

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake test to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/[USERNAME]/simple_text_extract. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Everyone interacting in the SimpleTextExtract project’s codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms and mailing lists is expected to follow the code of conduct.