Supported Document Formats

This page lists all the document formats supported by Apache Tika 1.3. Follow the links to the various parser class javadocs for more detailed information about each document format and how it is parsed by Tika.

HyperText Markup Language

The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the lingua franca of the web. Tika uses the TagSoup library to support virtually any kind of HTML found on the web. The output from the HtmlParser class is guaranteed to be well-formed and valid XHTML, and various heuristics are used to prevent things like inline scripts from cluttering the extracted text content.

XML and derived formats

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) format is a generic format that can be used for all kinds of content. Tika has custom parsers for some widely used XML vocabularies like XHTML, OOXML and ODF, but the default DcXMLParser class simply extracts the text content of the document and ignores any XML structure. The only exception to this rule are Dublin Core metadata elements that are used for the document metadata.

Microsoft Office document formats

Microsoft Office and some related applications produce documents in the generic OLE 2 Compound Document and Office Open XML (OOXML) formats. The older OLE 2 format was introduced in Microsoft Office version 97 and was the default format until Office version 2007 and the new XML-based OOXML format. The OfficeParser and OOXMLParser classes use Apache POI libraries to support text and metadata extraction from both OLE2 and OOXML documents.

OpenDocument Format

The OpenDocument format (ODF) is used most notably as the default format of the OpenOffice.org office suite. The OpenDocumentParser class supports this format and the earlier OpenOffice 1.0 format on which ODF is based.

Portable Document Format

The PDFParser class parsers Portable Document Format (PDF) documents using the Apache PDFBox library.

Electronic Publication Format

The EpubParser class supports the Electronic Publication Format (EPUB) used for many digital books.

Rich Text Format

The RTFParser class uses the standard javax.swing.text.rtf feature to extract text content from Rich Text Format (RTF) documents.

Compression and packaging formats

Tika uses the Commons Compress library to support various compression and packaging formats. The PackageParser class and its subclasses first parse the top level compression or packaging format and then pass the unpacked document streams to a second parsing stage using the parser instance specified in the parse context.

Text formats

Extracting text content from plain text files seems like a simple task until you start thinking of all the possible character encodings. The TXTParser class uses encoding detection code from the ICU project to automatically detect the character encoding of a text document.

Audio formats

Tika can detect several common audio formats and extract metadata from them. Even text extraction is supported for some audio files that contain lyrics or other textual content. The AudioParser and MidiParser classes use standard javax.sound features to process simple audio formats, and the Mp3Parser class adds support for the widely used MP3 format.

Image formats

The ImageParser class uses the standard javax.imageio feature to extract simple metadata from image formats supported by the Java platform. More complex image metadata is available through the JpegParser class that uses the metadata-extractor library to supports Exif metadata extraction from Jpeg images.

Video formats

Currently Tika only supports the Flash video format using a simple parsing algorithm implemented in the FLVParser class.

Java class files and archives

The ClassParser class extracts class names and method signatures from Java class files, and the ZipParser class supports also jar archives.

The mbox format

The MboxParser can extract email messages from the mbox format used by many email archives and Unix-style mailboxes.