X-Ray.Content 26.9.4917

<img src="logo.png" alt="X-Ray" width="160" align="right" />

X-Ray.Content

Content extraction for .NET. Point it at a document — Office, PDF, HTML, email, an archive — and get back the text, metadata, tables, images and a structured element tree, in whichever output format you ask for.

X-Ray.Content is the content-extraction package of the X-Ray family of .NET libraries. The engine is a native C# port of the Rust xberg extraction engine: every extractor, type and renderer is reimplemented in managed C#, not wrapped over a native library.

Install

dotnet add package X-Ray.Content

The package id is hyphenated; the API lives under the XRay.Content namespace, since a hyphen is not valid in a C# identifier.

Targets net10.0.

Extract a document

using XRay.Content.Core;

var extractor = new Extractor();

var result = extractor.Extract(
    ExtractInput.FromUri("quarterly-report.pdf"),
    new ExtractionConfig { OutputFormat = OutputFormat.Markdown });

var doc = result.Results[0];

Console.WriteLine(doc.MimeType);              // application/pdf
Console.WriteLine(doc.Content);               // the rendered Markdown
Console.WriteLine(doc.Metadata.Title);
Console.WriteLine(doc.Tables.Count);

Bytes work the same way when you already hold the file:

var input = ExtractInput.FromBytes(bytes, "application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document");

Extract never throws for a bad document: a failure lands in result.Errors with a type and code, and an unsupported MIME type comes back as an empty document carrying a ProcessingWarning. ExtractAsync is available for the same call.

Output formats

OutputFormat selects how ExtractedDocument.Content is rendered — the extracted document model is the same either way:

Set IncludeDocumentStructure = true to also get the Document heading tree, and ResultFormat.ElementBased to get the flat element stream instead of one rendered string.

Formats it reads

Word, Excel, PowerPoint (modern and legacy binary), OpenDocument, RTF, WordPerfect, PDF, HTML/XML, Markdown/Djot/AsciiDoc/reStructuredText/Org/Typst/LaTeX, EPUB and FictionBook, email (EML, MSG, PST), iWork, HWP/HWPX, images (metadata and EXIF), CSV/TSV/DBF, JSON/YAML/TOML, BibTeX and citation formats, Jupyter notebooks, source code, and ZIP/TAR/7z/GZip archives (extracted recursively as child documents).

Optional OCR

Extraction is pure managed and pulls no native dependencies. OCR is the one exception, and it is off by default:

var config = new ExtractionConfig
{
    Ocr = new OcrOptions { Mode = OcrMode.ScanOnly },   // or AllImages
};

ScanOnly recognises the PDF pages a scan detector flags; AllImages also reads every embedded image and inserts its text inline after the image it came from. OCR is additive — native text is never replaced — and never fatal: a missing checkpoint or an undecodable image becomes a ProcessingWarning, not an exception.

Turning it on loads PaddleOCR, which brings SkiaSharp and PDFium. A caller that never sets Ocr loads neither. Nothing is downloaded on your behalf: point OcrOptions.ModelDirectory at a checkpoint you already have.

Links

• Source — the port lives under dotnet/ in the curiosity-ai/x-ray-content repository
• Architecture, scope and conventions
• Port status and work breakdown
• Issues

License

MIT AND Apache-2.0. The package is MIT, except for a handful of files that are derivative works of Apache-2.0-only Rust crates and remain under that license — see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md for exactly which files and which upstreams.