trunk/src/site/apt/formats.apt

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                       Supported Document Formats
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Supported Document Formats

   This page lists all the document formats supported by Apache Tika 0.6.
   Follow the links to the various parser class javadocs for more detailed
   information about each document format and how it is parsed by Tika.

%{toc|section=1|fromDepth=1}

* {HyperText Markup Language}

   The HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the lingua franca of the web.
   Tika uses the {{{http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/XML/tagsoup/}TagSoup}}
   library to support virtually any kind of HTML found on the web.
   The output from the
   {{{api/org/apache/tika/parser/html/HtmlParser.html}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
   {{{api/org/apache/tika/parser/xml/DcXMLParser.html}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
   {{{api/org/apache/tika/parser/microsoft/OfficeParser.html}OfficeParser}}
   and
   {{{api/org/apache/tika/parser/microsoft/ooxml/OOXMLParser.html}OOXMLParser}}
   classes use {{{http://poi.apache.org/}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
   {{{api/org/apache/tika/parser/odf/OpenDocumentParser.html}OpenDocumentParser}}
   class supports this format and the earlier OpenOffice 1.0 format on which
   ODF is based.

* {Portable Document Format}

   The {{{api/org/apache/tika/parser/pdf/PDFParser.html}PDFParser}} class
   parsers Portable Document Format (PDF) documents using the
   {{{http://pdfbox.apache.org/}Apache PDFBox}} library.

* {Electronic Publication Format}

   The {{{api/org/apache/tika/parser/epub/EpubParser.html}EpubParser}} class
   supports the Electronic Publication Format (EPUB) used for many digital
   books.

* {Rich Text Format}

   The {{{api/org/apache/tika/parser/rtf/RTFParser.html}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 {{{http://commons.apache.org/compress/}Commons Compress}}
   library to support various compression and packaging formats. The
   {{{api/org/apache/tika/parser/pkg/PackageParser.html}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
   {{{api/org/apache/tika/parser/txt/TXTParser.html}TXTParser}} class uses
   encoding detection code from the {{{http://site.icu-project.org/}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
   {{{api/org/apache/tika/parser/audio/AudioParser.html}AudioParser}}
   and {{{api/org/apache/tika/parser/audio/MidiParser.html}MidiParser}}
   classes use standard javax.sound features to process simple audio
   formats, and the
   {{{api/org/apache/tika/parser/mp3/Mp3Parser.html}Mp3Parser}} class
   adds support for the widely used MP3 format.

* {Image formats}

   The {{{api/org/apache/tika/parser/image/ImageParser.html}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
   {{{api/org/apache/tika/parser/jpeg/JpegParser.html}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
   {{{api/org/apache/tika/parser/flv/FLVParser}FLVParser}} class.

* {Java class files and archives}

   The {{{api/org/apache/tika/parser/asm/ClassParser}ClassParser}} class
   extracts class names and method signatures from Java class files, and
   the {{{api/org/apache/tika/parser/pkg/ZipParser.html}ZipParser}} class
   supports also jar archives.

* {The mbox format}

   The {{{api/org/apache/tika/parser/mbox/MboxParser.html}MboxParser}} can
   extract email messages from the mbox format used by many email archives
   and Unix-style mailboxes.