Apache Tika
Detects file types and extracts text and document details from 1,000+ formats through one Java interface.
Apache Tika is an open-source Java toolkit for turning many document types into usable text. It gives ingestion and search workflows one consistent way to handle files across formats.
Key Features:
- Broad Format Support - Detects and reads more than 1,000 file types
- Text Extraction - Pulls readable text from documents for search, analysis, and processing
- Document Details - Captures useful file information through the same interface
- Java Based - Built in Java and released under the Apache-2.0 license
Web scraping workflow
How to use Apache Tika in a web scraping pipeline
Apache Tika detects document types and extracts text and metadata from supported files. It can process PDFs and office documents discovered during a crawl when HTML selectors are no longer the right extraction tool.
A practical workflow
- A separate crawler downloads an allowed document and records its source URL, capture time and content hash.
- Send the stored file to a configured Tika parser and collect the extracted text and metadata.
- Validate the output and pass it to a search index, structured extraction stage or document archive with the original file reference attached.
When it fits
Use it when a website's useful content includes several document formats and the pipeline needs a common extraction interface. Keeping original files lets you rerun parsing when configuration or format support changes.
Boundaries
Tika is a content-analysis toolkit, not a complete website crawler. Extraction quality depends on the document and parser configuration. Treat downloaded files as untrusted, enforce processing limits and inspect empty or malformed output; extracted text does not necessarily preserve the original reading order or business meaning.
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Our productRepository
apache/tika
Stars
4.1KForks
1KLast commit
2026-10-12License
Apache-2.0Language
Java
Metrics recorded 2026-10-16
Repository details
Last push: 2026-10-13
License source: Repository license file
Frequently asked questions
What is Apache Tika used for?
Apache Tika detects document types and extracts text and metadata through parsers for formats such as PDF and office documents. Applications use it to identify and process file content. Supported extraction depends on the format and parser configuration.
Sources (checked ): Apache Tika project
Is Apache Tika free?
Apache Tika is open source under Apache 2.0. You can run it under those license terms; infrastructure and any external services used in your processing pipeline have separate costs.
Sources (checked ): Apache Tika project
Sources
Verified against the apache/tika repository.