Reading PDF content with itextsharp dll in VB.NET or C#

How can I read PDF content with the itextsharp with the Pdfreader class. My PDF may include Plain text or Images of the text.

using iTextSharp.text.pdf;
using iTextSharp.text.pdf.parser;
using System.IO;

public string ReadPdfFile(string fileName)
{
    StringBuilder text = new StringBuilder();

    if (File.Exists(fileName))
    {
        PdfReader pdfReader = new PdfReader(fileName);

        for (int page = 1; page <= pdfReader.NumberOfPages; page++)
        {
            ITextExtractionStrategy strategy = new SimpleTextExtractionStrategy();
            string currentText = PdfTextExtractor.GetTextFromPage(pdfReader, page, strategy);

            currentText = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(ASCIIEncoding.Convert(Encoding.Default, Encoding.UTF8, Encoding.Default.GetBytes(currentText)));
            text.Append(currentText);
        }
        pdfReader.Close();
    }
    return text.ToString();
}

LGPL / FOSS iTextSharp 4.x

var pdfReader = new PdfReader(path); //other filestream etc
byte[] pageContent = _pdfReader .GetPageContent(pageNum); //not zero based
byte[] utf8 = Encoding.Convert(Encoding.Default, Encoding.UTF8, pageContent);
string textFromPage = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(utf8);

None of the other answers were useful to me, they all seem to target the AGPL v5 of iTextSharp. I could never find any reference to SimpleTextExtractionStrategy or LocationTextExtractionStrategy in the FOSS version.

Something else that might be very useful in conjunction with this:

const string PdfTableFormat = @"\(.*\)Tj";
Regex PdfTableRegex = new Regex(PdfTableFormat, RegexOptions.Compiled);

List<string> ExtractPdfContent(string rawPdfContent)
{
    var matches = PdfTableRegex.Matches(rawPdfContent);

    var list = matches.Cast<Match>()
        .Select(m => m.Value
            .Substring(1) //remove leading (
            .Remove(m.Value.Length - 4) //remove trailing )Tj
            .Replace(@"\)", ")") //unencode parens
            .Replace(@"\(", "(")
            .Trim()
        )
        .ToList();
    return list;
}

This will extract the text-only data from the PDF if the text displayed is Foo(bar) it will be encoded in the PDF as (Foo\(bar\))Tj, this method would return Foo(bar) as expected. This method will strip out lots of additional information such as location coordinates from the raw pdf content.

Here is a VB.NET solution based on ShravankumarKumar's solution.

This will ONLY give you the text. The images are a different story.

Public Shared Function GetTextFromPDF(PdfFileName As String) As String
    Dim oReader As New iTextSharp.text.pdf.PdfReader(PdfFileName)

    Dim sOut = ""

    For i = 1 To oReader.NumberOfPages
        Dim its As New iTextSharp.text.pdf.parser.SimpleTextExtractionStrategy

        sOut &= iTextSharp.text.pdf.parser.PdfTextExtractor.GetTextFromPage(oReader, i, its)
    Next

    Return sOut
End Function

In my case, I just wanted the text from a specific area of the PDF document so I used a rectangle around the area and extracted the text from it. In the sample below the coordinates are for the entire page. I don't have PDF authoring tools so when it came time to narrow down the rectangle to the specific location I took a few guesses at the coordinates until the area was found.

Rectangle _pdfRect = new Rectangle(0f, 0f, 612f, 792f); // Entire page - PDF coordinate system 0,0 is bottom left corner.  72 points / inch
RenderFilter _renderfilter = new RegionTextRenderFilter(_pdfRect);
ITextExtractionStrategy _strategy = new FilteredTextRenderListener(new LocationTextExtractionStrategy(), _filter);
string _text = PdfTextExtractor.GetTextFromPage(_pdfReader, 1, _strategy);

As noted by the above comments the resulting text doesn't maintain any of the formatting found in the PDF document, however, I was happy that it did preserve the carriage returns. In my case, there were enough constants in the text that I was able to extract the values that I required.