Can MySQL fulltextsearch go through PDFs and Word Files?

ChatGPT_Prompt
Can mysql Full Text Search analyze PDF files and Microsoft Word files?

ChatGPT_Answer
No, MySQL's native **Full-Text Search (FTS)** does not have built-in capabilities to analyze or index content from binary files such as PDF or Microsoft Word files. MySQL can only perform full-text searches on text-based data stored within the database itself (e.g., in columns of type `TEXT`, `VARCHAR`, `LONGTEXT`, etc.).

To achieve full-text search capabilities for PDFs, Word documents, or other types of binary files, you would need to extract the text content from these files and store it in a MySQL database. This requires several steps:

### Steps to Index and Search PDFs and Word Documents with MySQL FTS:

1. **Extract Text from PDF/Word Files:**
   - Use a tool or library to extract the text content from the files. Some common options include:
     - For **PDFs**:
       - **Apache Tika**: A powerful library that can extract text and metadata from many file formats, including PDFs and Word files.
       - **Poppler**: A PDF rendering library that includes tools like `pdftotext` for extracting text.
     - For **Word Documents**:
       - **Apache POI**: A Java library that can extract content from Microsoft Office documents (Word, Excel, etc.).
       - **python-docx**: A Python library to extract text from `.docx` Word files.

2. **Store Extracted Text in MySQL:**
   - Once the text is extracted, store it in a **TEXT** or **LONGTEXT** column in a MySQL table.
   - You can also store metadata (like document title, author, date, etc.) alongside the extracted text.

3. **Create a Full-Text Index:**
   - After storing the text in the MySQL table, create a **FULLTEXT** index on the text columns:
     ```sql
     ALTER TABLE documents ADD FULLTEXT(text_column);
     ```
   - This allows you to perform full-text search queries using the **`MATCH()`** and **`AGAINST()`** functions.

4. **Perform Full-Text Searches:**
   - Once indexed, you can search the extracted text using MySQL’s full-text search functionality:
     ```sql
     SELECT * FROM documents
     WHERE MATCH(text_column) AGAINST('your search terms' IN NATURAL LANGUAGE MODE);
     ```

### Alternative: Using a Dedicated Search Engine

If your goal is to perform full-text search on a large collection of PDFs or Word documents, you may want to use a specialized search engine like **Elasticsearch** or **Solr**. These tools are designed for indexing and searching large volumes of text and offer built-in support for indexing content from PDFs, Word files, and many other formats via **Apache Tika**.

- **Elasticsearch**: It integrates with Tika to extract content from files and can handle complex queries, proximity search, relevance ranking, etc.
- **Solr**: A similar tool that also uses Tika for extracting content and is suitable for large-scale text search applications.

### Summary:
- **MySQL Full-Text Search** cannot directly index or search PDF or Word files.
- You need to extract the text content from the files and store it in MySQL to make it searchable.
- For more advanced document search (including PDFs, Word files, etc.), a dedicated search engine like **Elasticsearch** or **Solr** might be a better fit.