Tika Parser API

Tika Parser is an interface that provides the facility to extract content and metadata from any type of document. It is key component of Tika and organized into the org.apache.tika.parser package. It provides a parse() method which has the following signature.

void parse(InputStream stream, ContentHandler handler, Metadata metadata, ParseContext context)
throws IOException, SAXException, TikaException;

It takes four arguments, InputStream, ContentHandler, Metadata and ParseContect class objects. The purpose of each of the four arguments is shown below.

These arguments have following description.

Argument	Description
InputStream stream	Document is read from this input stream.
ContentHandler handler	ContentHandler is an interface that handle the content of the document.
Metadata metadata	It is a multi-valued metadata container.
ParseContext context	It is used to pass context information to Tika parsers.

Tika also provides AutoDetectParser class which automatically figure out what kind of content a file has, and then calls appropriate parser.

Apart from these, it supports various other parsers classes that can be used to parse document of parse class type. See the following table.

Parser	Package	Description
AppleSingleFileParser	org.apache.tika.parser.apple	It is used to parse apple file.
ClassParser	org.apache.tika.parser.asm	It is used to parse class file.
AudioParser	org.apache.tika.parser.audio	It is used to parse audio file.
MidiParser	org.apache.tika.parser.audio	It is used to parse midi file.
Pkcs7Parser	org.apache.tika.parser.crypto	It is used to parse pkcs7.
TSDParser	org.apache.tika.parser.crypto	It is used to parse tsd.
DWGParser	org.apache.tika.parser.dwg	It is used to parse dwg.
EnviHeaderParser	org.apache.tika.parser.envi	It is used to parse envi.
EpubParser	org.apache.tika.parser.epub	It is used to parse epub.
ExecutableParser	org.apache.tika.parser.executable	It is used to parse executable.
HtmlParser	org.apache.tika.parser.html	It is used to parse html file.
ImageParser	org.apache.tika.parser.image	It is used to parse image file.
WebPParser	org.apache.tika.parser.image	It is used to parse webp.
IptcAnpaParser	org.apache.tika.parser.iptc	It is used to parse iptcanpa.
JpegParser	org.apache.tika.parser.jpeg	It is used to parse jpeg.
DBFParser	org.apache.tika.parser.dbf	It is used to parse dbf file.
Mp3Parser	org.apache.tika.parser.mp3	It is used to parse mp3.
MP4Parser	org.apache.tika.parser.mp4	It is used to parse mp4.
PDFParser	org.apache.tika.parser.pdf	It is used to parse pdf file.

Tika Parser Example

In this example, we are using AutoDetectParser that detect document type automatically and then parse the content and metadata.

package tikaexample;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;

import org.apache.tika.exception.TikaException;
import org.apache.tika.metadata.Metadata;
import org.apache.tika.parser.AutoDetectParser;
import org.apache.tika.sax.BodyContentHandler;
import org.xml.sax.SAXException;
public class AutoDetectParseExample {
	public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException, SAXException, TikaException {
		BodyContentHandler handler = new BodyContentHandler();
	    AutoDetectParser parser = new AutoDetectParser();
	    Metadata metadata = new Metadata();
	    try (InputStream stream = AutoDetectParseExample.class.getResourceAsStream("hello.txt")) {
	        parser.parse(stream, handler, metadata);
	        System.out.println(handler.toString());
	    }
	}
}

Output:

Following is the content of hello.txt file after extraction.