Check the document password protected or not

Question

I am using Apache-Tika to read and write the documents. So that I can get the advantage of reading both PDF and Microsoft documents.

I want to check whether the document password protected or not before proceeding. Is there any explicit method to do this?

Answer 1

No, there is no way to check in advance. This is because Tika won't know the file is password protected until it gets a fair way through processing it

If you know the password for a file, you should use logic something like:

ParseContext context = new ParseContext();
context.set(PasswordProvider.class, new PasswordProvider() {
     public String getPassword(Metadata metadata) {
        return "password";
    }
});
parser.parse(stream, handler, metadata, context);

Otherwise, if you don't know the password and you're going to prompt for it, provide a PasswordProvider class which will take the Metadata object and prompt / lookup based on that.

The other option is to try to parse, catch EncryptedDocumentException and then re-parse with a PasswordProvider if available. Generally a EncryptedDocumentException gets thrown pretty early, so the overhead isn't too high