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The Apache Tika™ toolkit detects and extracts metadata and structured text content from various documents using existing parser libraries. You can find the latest release on the download page. See the Getting Started guide for instructions on how to start using Tika.

I read that and I still don't get it, but I can't find any other information on the site. Can someone provide a specific example of what problem this project solves?

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At the core, it is a library that extracts text from various document formats (PDF, xlsx, docx, pptx, etc.).

It is important to note, however, that Tika in itself doesn't implement the text extractors, but rather combines different different projects (e.g., Apache POI) into one simple interface "getText".

If you are performance-oriented, thought, you may find that you will find yourself using the individual parsers as you'd want different settings/options to maximize throughput.

Think of it as trying to pull text out of PDF / Office Docs / etc into a form (text, usually) that can be fed to a search engine, catalog, or whatever else you'd like to do with it.

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