RTF to Plain Text in Java

Question

How do you convert an RTF string to plain text in Java? The obvious answer is to use Swing's RTFEditorKit, and that seems to be the common answer around the Internet. However the write method that claims to return plain text isn't actually implemented... it's hard-coded to just throw an IOException in Java6.

score 21 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 28 '11 at 23:27

21

I use Swing's RTFEditorKit in Java 6 like this:

RTFEditorKit rtfParser = new RTFEditorKit();
Document document = rtfParser.createDefaultDocument();
rtfParser.read(new ByteArrayInputStream(rtfBytes), document, 0);
String text = document.getText(0, document.getLength());

and thats working.

answered Apr 28 '11 at 23:27

morja

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Got it working using this solution, though it didn't work at first either. It turns out that my input data was invalid, and the conversion was failing silently and returning an empty string. – edm3 Apr 29 '11 at 18:13
1

It works for me, but for some reason the text comes out with dropped characters. – george_h Dec 19 '13 at 08:41
It works fine in WIndows platform, but for *nix platform, it has dependecy with X11 window server. – Valijon Feb 16 '16 at 14:42
it doesn't work with "\line" code – Ekaterina Ivanova iceja.net Jun 12 '22 at 13:18

score 6 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 28 '11 at 22:45

6

Try Apache Tika: http://tika.apache.org/0.9/formats.html#Rich_Text_Format

answered Apr 28 '11 at 22:45

Aleadam

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3

Tika use 'RTFEditorKit' on the backend – ggarciao Apr 19 '13 at 08:51
Tika is just for plain text and metadata, am I right? – Xelian Feb 02 '16 at 15:06

Jon Iles · Answer 3 · 2017-01-13T12:44:08.623

2

You might consider RTF Parser Kit as a lightweight alternative to the Swing RTFEditorKit. The line below shows plain text extraction from an RTF file. The RTF file is read from the input stream, the extracted text is written to the output stream.

new StreamTextConverter().convert(new RtfStreamSource(inputStream), outputStream, "UTF-8");

(full disclosure: I'm the author of RTF Parser Kit)

edited Jan 13 '17 at 12:44

answered Jan 13 '17 at 12:36

Jon Iles

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Nice job! But "Kotlin: Unresolved reference: MyRtfListener" – Ekaterina Ivanova iceja.net Jun 13 '22 at 13:53
Does it mean that I must implement IRtfListener myself? – Ekaterina Ivanova iceja.net Jun 13 '22 at 14:09
@CatherineIvanova the one line example above will extract plain text for you... no need to implement the listener. I think your reference to `MyRtfListener` comes from the RTF Parser Kit readme which does illustrate the case where you'd provide your own listener. – Jon Iles Jun 13 '22 at 15:54
@JonIles thanks for the parser project! Can you see also this question https://stackoverflow.com/questions/74111741/get-files-from-an-rtl-input-in-java ? – yaylitzis Oct 18 '22 at 13:23

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 29 '18 at 08:11

Here is the full code to parse & write RTF as a plain text

    import java.io.FileInputStream;
    import java.io.FileWriter;
    import java.io.IOException;
    import java.io.InputStreamReader;
    import javax.swing.text.BadLocationException;
    import javax.swing.text.Document;
    import javax.swing.text.rtf.RTFEditorKit;

    public class rtfToJson {
    public static void main(String[] args)throws IOException, BadLocationException {
    // TODO Auto-generated method stub
    RTFEditorKit rtf = new RTFEditorKit();
    Document doc = rtf.createDefaultDocument();

    FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream("C:\\SampleINCData.rtf");
    InputStreamReader i =new InputStreamReader(fis,"UTF-8");
    rtf.read(i,doc,0);
   // System.out.println(doc.getText(0,doc.getLength()));
    String doc1 = doc.getText(0,doc.getLength());


    try{    
           FileWriter fw=new FileWriter("B:\\Sample INC Data.txt");    
           fw.write(doc1);    
           fw.close();    
          }catch(Exception e)
    {
              System.out.println(e);
              }    
          System.out.println("Success...");    
     }    

    }

RTF to Plain Text in Java

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