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I’ve had this happen to me several times now; I’m testing a website, let’s say an airline website, I purchased my ticket and the last step of the flow is to download the ticket in a PDF format to print it. Well end of the road I would think, and just test the PDFs by hand. After all, Selenium only tests HTML pages, I can’t really test the content of the PDF.

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closed as not a real question by Anna Lear Feb 12 '12 at 3:29


I'm confused - why are you reposting the content of the blog that you are linking to ? What is your question ? –  Phil Kirkham Jan 28 '12 at 16:36
@Phil K I add content to get more idea on my Question. I would like to know how to do automation Testing PDF files with Selenium using JAVA? –  Jasmine.Olivra Jan 28 '12 at 16:42
The question is a little confusing. The blog post that you reference seems to answer the question in the context of the question. As the pdf document is opened, to the bet of my knowledge, in an extension of the browser, I don't see how Selenium would interact with it, but, will not post as an answer as I could be wrong there. Great blog post by the way. –  Lyndon Vrooman Jan 28 '12 at 17:03
Jasmine, please rephrase your post as a question. –  user246 Jan 28 '12 at 18:05
Jasmine, I'd agree with the other commenters. You don't actually have a question here that anyone can answer. SQA isn't meant for general chatting and discussion (go to for that) - it's meant to be about specific questions and answers. If you were posting in a general discussion forum this might be an okay way to start a discussion, but it doesn't really fit here. My suggestion would be that if you want to learn more, start by trying out the suggestions on the link you posted, then come back with actual questions about problems you run into doing that. –  testerab Jan 28 '12 at 23:44

1 Answer 1

Selenium is a library that allows you to manipulate web pages. Selenium does not provide any access to the PDF documents at all.

The article you provided is about parsing PDF in ruby with PDF::Reader.

Please consider the following discussion about the PDF parsing in java:

Stackoverflow Search results: [java] [pdf] extract

What is the easiest way to extract data from a PDF?

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