Guides

Text Search and Selection

In the React Native SDK, ComPDF provides the CPDFTextSearcher API to search for specific text in PDF documents, highlight results, and retrieve contextual text snippets.

Get a CPDFTextSearcher Instance

To perform a search, obtain a CPDFTextSearcher object from the CPDFDocument:

const pdfReaderRef = useRef<CPDFReaderView>(null);

<CPDFReaderView
  ref={pdfReaderRef}
	document={samplePDF}
/>

const document = pdfReaderRef.current?._pdfDocument;
const textSearcher = document!.textSearcher;

Text Search

Use the searchText method to search for keywords in the PDF document. You can specify search options such as case sensitivity or whole-word matching.

// Search for keywords in the PDF document
const results = await textSearcher!.searchText('keywords', CPDFSearchOptions.CaseInsensitive);

The search results are returned as a list of CPDFTextRange objects, each representing the position of the keyword in the document.

Explanation of Search Settings

Enum Value	Description
CPDFSearchOptions.CaseInsensitive	Case-insensitive search (default)
CPDFSearchOptions.CaseSensitive	Case sensitive search
CPDFSearchOptions.MatchWholeWord	Matches a whole word only

Select a Search Result

You can highlight a specific result in the document using the selection method:

// Select the first search result
if (results.length > 0) {
  await textSearcher.selection(results[0]);
}

Clear Search Results

To reset the search state and clear results:

await textSearcher.clearSearch();

Retrieve Contextual Text

With textSearcher.getText, you can extract a snippet of text for a given range and optionally expand the range to include surrounding context.

// Assume we already have a search result
const range = results[0];

// Expand the range to include 20 characters before and after
const expandedRange = range.expanded(20, 20);

// Retrieve contextual text from the corresponding page
const contextText = await textSearcher.getText(expandedRange);
print("Text with context: $contextText");