Search text in Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentations

To search a keyword in Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentations Search(String) method is used. This method returns the collection of SearchResult objects. For details, see Search Text.

Here are the steps to search a keyword in Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentation:

  • Instantiate Parser object for the initial presentation;
  • Call Search(string) method and obtain the collection of SearchResult objects;
  • Iterate through the collection and get the position and text.
Warning
Search(String) method returns null value if search isn’t supported for the presentation. For example, text extraction isn’t supported for Zip archive. Therefore, for Zip archive Search(String) method returns null. For empty Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentation Search(String) method returns an empty collection.

The following example shows how to find a keyword in Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentation:

// Create an instance of Parser class
using(Parser parser = new Parser(filePath))
{
    // Search a keyword:
    IEnumerable<SearchResult> sr = parser.Search("page number");
   
    // Iterate over search results
    foreach(SearchResult s in sr)
    {
        // Print an index and found text:
        Console.WriteLine(string.Format("At {0}: {1}", s.Position, s.Text));
    }
}

Search(String, SearchOptions) is used for the advanced search in Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentations - like search with regular expressions, search by pages etc. SearchOptions parameter is used to customize a search.

Here are the steps to search with a regular expression in Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentation:

The following example shows how to search with a regular expression in Microsoft Office PowerPoint presentation:

// Create an instance of Parser class
using(Parser parser = new Parser(filePath))
{
    // Search with a regular expression with case matching
    IEnumerable<SearchResult> sr = parser.Search("page number: [0-9]+", new SearchOptions(true, false, true));
    // Iterate over search results
    foreach(SearchResult s in sr)
    {
        // Print an index and found text:
        Console.WriteLine(string.Format("At {0}: {1}", s.Position, s.Text));
    }
}

More resources

GitHub examples

You may easily run the code above and see the feature in action in our GitHub examples:

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