Custom text extractors

GroupDocs.Search supports indexing of many document formats. But there is also the possibility to implement support for any format other than the existing ones.

The following example demonstrates how to implement a custom text extractor.

C#

public class LogExtractor : IFieldExtractor
{
    private readonly string[] extensions = new string[] { ".log" };
 
    public string[] Extensions
    {
        get { return extensions; }
    }
 
    public DocumentField[] GetFields(string filePath)
    {
        FileInfo fileInfo = new FileInfo(filePath);
        DocumentField[] fields = new DocumentField[]
        {
            new DocumentField("FileName", fileInfo.FullName),
            new DocumentField("CreationDate", fileInfo.CreationTime.ToString(CultureInfo.InvariantCulture)),
            new DocumentField("Content", ExtractContent(filePath)),
        };
        return fields;
    }
 
    private string ExtractContent(string filePath)
    {
        string text = File.ReadAllText(filePath);
        return text;
    }
}

The next example shows how to use the custorm extractor for indexing.

C#

string indexFolder = @"c:\MyIndex\"; // Specify path to the index folder
string documentsFolder = @"c:\MyDocuments\"; // Specify path to a folder containing documents to search
 
IndexSettings settings = new IndexSettings();
settings.CustomExtractors.Add(new LogExtractor()); // Adding custom text extractor to the index settings
 
Index index = new Index(indexFolder, settings); // Creating or loading an index
 
index.Add(documentsFolder); // Indexing documents from the specified folder

Note that custom extractors are not saved in an index and must be created and added each time the index is created or loaded. However, the same code can be used to create a new index and open an existing one. In this case, when opening an existing index, custom extractors from the index settings passed to the constructor will be used, the remaining index settings will be loaded from disk.

More resources

GitHub examples

You may easily run the code from documentation articles and see the features in action in our GitHub examples:

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