Apache POI Word - Text Extraction

This chapter explains how to extract simple text data from a Word document using Java. In case you want to extract metadata from a Word document, make use of Apache Tika.

For .docx files, we use the class org.apache.poi.xwpf.extractor.XPFFWordExtractor that extracts and returns simple data from a Word file. In the same way, we have different methodologies to extract headings, footnotes, table data, etc. from a Word file.

The following code shows how to extract simple text from a Word file −

// create a document object from existing work document
XWPFDocument docx = new XWPFDocument(new FileInputStream("example.docx"));
      
// using XWPFWordExtractor Class
XWPFWordExtractor we = new XWPFWordExtractor(docx);
// extract the text
System.out.println(we.getText());

Example - Extracting Text from a Document

ApachePoiDocDemo.java

package com.tutorialspoint;

import java.io.FileInputStream;
import org.apache.poi.xwpf.extractor.XWPFWordExtractor;
import org.apache.poi.xwpf.usermodel.XWPFDocument;

public class ApachePoiDocDemo {
   public static void main(String[] args)throws Exception {
      XWPFDocument docx = new XWPFDocument(new FileInputStream("example.docx"));
      
      //using XWPFWordExtractor Class
      XWPFWordExtractor we = new XWPFWordExtractor(docx);
      System.out.println(we.getText());
      we.close();
   }
}

Output

It will generate the following output −

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