search inside documents

[marcus don]

Hi all,
I need to search programmatically (from java code)
inside xls, doc, pdf stored in blob fields.

Does exist a product that could be useful?

Does UltraSearch works fine?

Any Ideas?

Thanks

[Ulf Dittmer]

I'm not aware of a product or project that can search through all of these. Just for kicks, you could try opening any of these file types as byte stream, and look for your search string that way.

The AccessingFileFormats wiki page has links to a few libraries that can access these file types individually: jExcelAPI and POI for Excel, JPedal for PDF, and POI for Word.

Not sure what this has to do with Oracle, though (which is what this forum is all about).

[Paul Sturrock]

UltraSearch does this. However it is not just a tool to search inside proprietary file types, its designed to build indices of searchable content (i.e. it is an "information retrieval" product) so it is possibly a far more complex product than you perhaps require. However, if it is an IR product you are looking for you probably need to look at Lucene as well as UltraSearch.
[ April 12, 2006: Message edited by: Paul Sturrock ]