[notice88]

I need something which can be use in php to search inside my public apache folder so that i can display the searched document which the text query is writting inside the document. What I did temporarily is by tagging.. some info about the documents is saved in the database with its ID and thats where Im searching the documents.

[Atli]

There is no doubt plenty of code out there that will let you open the PDF as text in PHP, you just need to look for it. A quick Google search lead me to this article. I'd say that's worth a try.

Then there are also non-PHP tools you can use, like the Linux pdftotext command. That could be used on Linux based servers to extract the text from the PDF.

You could then store that in a database and use it's search capabilities on it, rather than invent your own inside of PHP. For instance, if you store the text in a MySQL MyISAM table, you could easily set up a Full-Text search index on it.