Java RTF Parser

Question

Does anyone know of a robust RTF parser I can use in Java? I need to extract plain text, including international text. It would also be nice to extract embedded images and files. It could also be a C++ or other library that I can easily call, or if there is good source code, I can convert to Java.

The following libraries do not cover enough of the RTF, or fail to parse some valid RTFs

1. Java Swing's RTFEditorKit, quite basic and brittle Apache Tikka, nutch, and lots of other tools use this.
2. an RTF library from iText (com.lowagie.etc...), not too comprehensive
3. etranslate rtf library (this is the most complete of the java ones) Not sure if there is an updated version, but the version I got fails on some of my rtf collection (the RTFs are valid, at least they open in MsWord and OpenOffice OK).

There's a C# library that's reasonably complete, but alas ...it's C# and not Java. http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/27431/Writing-Your-Own-RTF-Converter

I also looked into OpenOffice, it is too slow for what I need, though it's probably very comprehensive.

(I did do web searches and stack overflow searches before posting this question, so if you are referring me to an ancient "already asked" post, it probably doesn't have an answer there. But feel free to point it out, in case I missed it!)

Xenomorphic

Answer 1

You may find RTF Parser Kit useful. It provides a stream-based parser which delivers events to you as the document is parsed. There is a simple example text extractor provided which demonstrates how the API can be used.

Zackzackariah

Answer 2

If your project is non-commercial then there is a good free Java rtf to xml library here, better than etranslate in my opinion, and you can process the xml from there. However if you are using it for commercial purposes you will have to arrange licensing with rtf-to-xml.com, the company that developed it.

However having once been in a similar situation, before finding rtf-to-xml, I found a funny work around for this problem when I need to parse ms rtf on linux server. There is a free rich text processor, which is also a library called Ted It takes arguments from the command line with out the user interface and can be wrapped in JNI call.

I hope this helps.

Tirzah

I will check these out to see if they handle the weird/complex RTF files I'm coming across, and will report back here. – Xenomorphic

How did your experiments turn out. I am working on a project that has templates stored in rtf that I would like to convert in batch. – Combined

Sorry for the late reply, but the JNI wrapper worked out surprisingly well, translations were quick fire and forget no hanging out in memory sort of like an uncached C call. – Tirzah