Laravel Text Extractor

Developed and maintained by IntrAgile Kft.

Extract plain text from uploads on any Storage disk (PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenDocument, RTF, HTML, CSV and images), for search indexes, RAG pipelines and archives.

Magyar nyelvű leírás → README.hu.md

This is the Laravel integration of intragile/php-text-extractor: a facade, a config file, extraction straight from a filesystem disk and a doctor command. Everything the core promises applies here too: no Composer dependencies beyond Laravel, bounded memory, safe handling of untrusted files and a result that tells "no text" apart from "failed".

use IntrAgile\TextExtractor\Laravel\Facades\TextExtractor;

$result = TextExtractor::extractFromDisk($document->path, 's3');

if ($result->isSuccessful()) {
    $document->update(['content' => $result->text]);   // '' when there is no text
} elseif ($result->isRetryable()) {
    $this->release(300);                               // timeout, missing tool, storage error
} else {
    $document->update(['extraction_error' => $result->reason->value]);
}

Requirements

• PHP 8.2+, Laravel 12 or 13.
• ext-mbstring; ext-zip and ext-xmlreader for Office and OpenDocument files; ext-dom for HTML.
• pdftotext (poppler-utils) for PDF and tesseract for images, if you need those formats.

composer require intragile/laravel-text-extractor

# Debian / Ubuntu, with English and Hungarian OCR
apt-get install poppler-utils tesseract-ocr tesseract-ocr-eng tesseract-ocr-hun

php artisan text-extractor:doctor

The service provider and the TextExtractor alias are registered automatically.

Usage

use IntrAgile\TextExtractor\Laravel\Facades\TextExtractor;

TextExtractor::extractFromDisk('invoices/2026/0042.pdf');          // default disk
TextExtractor::extractFromDisk('uploads/scan.png', 's3');
TextExtractor::extract($request->file('document')->getRealPath(),
    $request->file('document')->getClientOriginalName());
TextExtractor::extractFromString($bytes, 'notes.txt');
TextExtractor::extractFromStream($stream, 'report.docx');

extractFromDisk() streams the object to a local temporary file, so a large file on S3 never has to fit in PHP memory. A missing file or a storage error is reported as Failed with reason unreadable, which is retryable.

The facade resolves IntrAgile\TextExtractor\Laravel\LaravelTextExtractor; inject that class, or the core IntrAgile\TextExtractor\TextExtractor singleton, wherever you prefer dependency injection. In tests, mock it with TextExtractor::shouldReceive('extractFromDisk').

The result

Every call returns an IntrAgile\TextExtractor\Result and never throws for problems with the file or the disk: a directory, a missing object or a failing S3 read is Failed/unreadable.

$result->reason tells you why, e.g. encrypted, no_text_layer or missing_tool. The complete table of reasons and the per-format output are in the core documentation.

In a queued job

public function handle(): void
{
    $result = TextExtractor::extractFromDisk($this->document->path, $this->document->disk);

    if ($result->isRetryable()) {
        $this->release(600);

        return;
    }

    $this->document->update([
        'content' => $result->text,
        'extraction_status' => $result->status->value,
        'extraction_reason' => $result->reason?->value,
    ]);
}

Keep the job's $timeout above limits.max_parse_seconds and process.timeout. The parse limit is checked between parser steps, so a single long libxml call can overrun it; the job timeout is the hard stop.

Configuration

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=text-extractor-config

An empty or non-numeric value means the default, so TEXT_EXTRACTOR_TIMEOUT= in .env is safe.

For Hungarian content, set TEXT_EXTRACTOR_OCR_LANGUAGES=hun+eng and TEXT_EXTRACTOR_FALLBACK_ENCODING=Windows-1250.

Custom extractors

List classes implementing IntrAgile\TextExtractor\Contracts\Extractor under extractors. They are resolved from the container and tried before the built-in extractors, in the order listed.

'extractors' => [
    App\TextExtraction\CloudOcrExtractor::class,
],

Artisan commands

php artisan text-extractor:doctor

Lists the PHP extensions, the pdftotext and tesseract binaries with their versions, and checks that every configured OCR language is installed. It exits with status 1 when something the configuration relies on is missing, so it can run as a deployment or container health check. A tool that is neither configured nor installed is reported as optional.

php artisan text-extractor:extract storage/app/sample.pdf
php artisan text-extractor:extract invoices/0042.pdf --disk=s3 --json

Shows the status, reason, format and text of one file, printed literally. The exit status is 0 for Extracted and Empty, 1 for any other result and 2 when no path is given.

License

MIT, see LICENSE.

Developed and maintained by IntrAgile Kft.