How to build a Text Extraction App using Next.js and TextAPI?

RapidAPI Hub provides you with thousands of these public APIs that you can use in your apps. Many APIs on RapidAPI Hub have free versions available, but you can also buy a premium version if the free version does not satisfy your need.

Today, I am building a text extraction application that will take a URL to some article, extracts it, and then show the user the extracted article. So without any further ado, let’s jump in.

Stack

We need to choose a stack first to build this application. I have decided to go with the Jamstack.

I am going to use Next.js for the client-side and TailwindCSS for the styling.

If you don’t know about Next.js, it is a JavaScript framework built on top of React and provides features like server-side rendering, static site generation, etc. Tailwind is a CSS framework that provides utility classes to speed up the development process.

Choosing The API

Let’s find an API that we can use to extract text from a webpage. Go to RapidAPI Hub and create an account if you haven’t already and then search for “text extraction” in the search section.

You will see different search results related to all the available text extraction APIs. For this piece, I am using TextAPI.

To use this API, you need to subscribe to it first. You can do this by clicking on Subscribe to Test button.

Subscribe to TextAPI

Once you click the button, you will be redirected to another page where different available subscription packages will be shown. Let’s go with the free one for now.

After all this, you will be redirected back to the original page. Here you will have a key x-rapidapi-key. Save it. It will be used later in the application.

Building The UI

You can create a Next.js boilerplate with TailwindCSS integrated by running the following command in your terminal. So let’s do that.

sh
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npx create-next-app -e with-tailwindcss text-extraction-app

This command is going to take a minute to set everything up. After generating the boilerplate, you will see a folder with the name text-extraction-app has been created. Open this folder in your preferred code editor. I am going to use VSCode for the project.

Project Files

When you open the project in your code editor, you will see the following directories and files in the root directory:

• pages directory: Inside it, you will have files index.js, _app.js, and another directory called api. You only need to know about the index.js file that is the main entry point in your project.
• public directory: This directory contains icons. You place your static files here to load later in the application.
• node_modules: It’s another directory that contains all the node modules you are using in your application.
• package.json: This file contains the metadata of your project.
• package-lock.json: This file is responsible for tracking the exact version of every installed package.
• postcss.config.js: This file contains PostCSS configurations.
• tailwind.config.js: It contains TailwindCSS configurations.
• readme.md: It’s a markdown file for documentation.

Before we move on to writing the code, open this file, and copy all of its content, then paste it inside the tailwind.config.js file in your project. These are some TailwindCSS configurations I have done specifically for this project. I have added some colors that you do not have by default with TailwindCSS and set some screen sizes.

Now let’s start writing the code. I am going to do it in steps so you can follow along.

→ STEP #1

Open the pages/index.js file and remove all the existing code. After this, copy-paste the following code there:

js
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export default function Home() {
	return (
		<div className="flex flex-col items-center relative min-h-screen">
			<h2 className="font-raleway font-bold text-6xl text-secondary pt-20 pb-6 md:text-3xl">
				Text <span className="text-active">Extraction</span> App
			</h2>
			<h3 className="text-danger text-2xl font-raleway font-bold uppercase tracking-wide mb-12 md:text-base md:px-4 md:text-center">
				Quickly Extract Text of Any Webpage
			</h3>
		</div>
	);
}

It will create two headings for you with the text “Text Extraction App” and “Quickly Extract Text of Any Webpage”. You can change it to anything you prefer.

→ STEP #2

Now let’s create an input field and extract button. The user will use the input field to provide the URL of an article. The extract button will send the URL to the API and get the extracted article.

For this, copy the following code and paste it in pages/index.js:

js
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export default function Home() {
	return (
		<div className="flex flex-col items-center relative min-h-screen">
			<h2 className="font-raleway font-bold text-6xl text-secondary pt-20 pb-6 md:text-3xl">
				Text <span className="text-active">Extraction</span> App
			</h2>
			<h3 className="text-danger text-2xl font-raleway font-bold uppercase tracking-wide mb-12 md:text-base md:px-4 md:text-center">
				Quickly Extract Text of Any Webpage
			</h3>
			<div className="flex flex-col justify-between items-center w-full md:items-center">
				<div className="flex w-full justify-center md:flex-col md:w-5/6">
					<input
						type="text"
						className="border border-primary outline-none w-2/5 px-4 py-2 rounded-sm bg-lightGrey text-secondary font-bold font-raleway md:w-full"
						placeholder="Paste the article link..."
					/>
					<button className="outline-none border border-active font-bold font-raleway ml-4 px-12 py-2 rounded-sm bg-active text-primary transition duration-300 hover:bg-bc hover:text-secondary hover:border-secondary md:h-16 md:my-12 md:ml-0">
						Extract Text
					</button>
				</div>
			</div>
		</div>
	);
}

This code is going to create an input field and button. I have also styled them a little bit using TailwindCSS.

→ STEP #3

Let’s create some states to store the user input and the extracted article that we will receive from the API. For this, copy-paste the following code in pages/index.js.

js
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import {useState} from 'react';
export default function Home() {
	const [url, setUrl] = useState('');
	const [extractedText, setExtractedText] = useState(null);
	return (
		<div className="flex flex-col items-center relative min-h-screen">
			<h2 className="font-raleway font-bold text-6xl text-secondary pt-20 pb-6 md:text-3xl">
				Text <span className="text-active">Extraction</span> App
			</h2>
			<h3 className="text-danger text-2xl font-raleway font-bold uppercase tracking-wide mb-12 md:text-base md:px-4 md:text-center">
				Quickly Extract Text of Any Webpage
			</h3>
			<div className="flex flex-col justify-between items-center w-full md:items-center">
				<div className="flex w-full justify-center md:flex-col md:w-5/6">
					<input
						type="text"
						className="border border-primary outline-none w-2/5 px-4 py-2 rounded-sm bg-lightGrey text-secondary font-bold font-raleway md:w-full"
						placeholder="Paste the article link..."
						onChange={e => setUrl(e.target.value)}
					/>
					<button className="outline-none border border-active font-bold font-raleway ml-4 px-12 py-2 rounded-sm bg-active text-primary transition duration-300 hover:bg-bc hover:text-secondary hover:border-secondary md:h-16 md:my-12 md:ml-0">
						Extract Text
					</button>
				</div>
			</div>
		</div>
	);
}

You can see that I have added an onChange event handler to set the state value as soon as the user writes something in the input field.

→ STEP #4

Let’s integrate the API now. For this, first, create a .env.local file and paste the following in it:

sh
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NEXT_PUBLIC_RAPIDAPI_KEY=YOUR-RAPIDAPI-KEY

You need to replace YOUR-RAPIDAPI-KEY here with the API key you got when you subscribed to the TextAPI. It is the value of x-rapidapi-key that you saved earlier.

Now download and add axios to your project. For this, run the following command in the terminal:

sh
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npm install axios

Now import axios at the top of the pages/index.js.

js
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import axios from 'axios';

→ STEP #5

We are going to use the Extract Text [From Webpage] endpoint of the TextAPI to get the extracted article.

I am also going to use the code snippet of (JavaScript) Axios that RapidAPI Hub provides us.

Fetching data using (JavaScript) Axios

Create a file called extract in the pages/api directory and copy-paste the following code there:

js
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import axios from 'axios';
export default async function handler(req, res) {
	if (req.method === 'GET') {
		const options = {
			method: 'GET',
			url: 'https://textapis.p.rapidapi.com/text',
			params: {
				url: req.query.url
			},
			headers: {
				'x-rapidapi-host': 'textapis.p.rapidapi.com',
				'x-rapidapi-key': process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_RAPIDAPI_KEY
			}
		};
		axios
			.request(options)
			.then(function (response) {
				res.status(200).json(response.data);
			})
			.catch(function (error) {
				console.error(error);
				res.status(response.status);
			});
	} else {
		res.status(400);
	}
}

Now let’s create a function in the pages/index.js file to request the /api/extract to get spell check details. You can just copy and replace the following code in pages/index.js file:

js
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import {useState} from 'react';
import axios from 'axios';
export default function Home() {
	const [url, setUrl] = useState('');
	const [extractedText, setExtractedText] = useState(null);
	/**
	 *
	 *
	 * Fetch extracted content from the url
	 */
	const fetchExtractedContent = async () => {
		try {
			const res = await axios.get(`/api/extract`, {
				params: {url}
			});
			const {data} = res;
			const {text} = data;
			setExtractedText(text);
		} catch (err) {
			console.log(err);
		}
	};
	return (
		<div className="flex flex-col items-center relative min-h-screen">
			<h2 className="font-raleway font-bold text-6xl text-secondary pt-20 pb-6 md:text-3xl">
				Text <span className="text-active">Extraction</span> App
			</h2>
			<h3 className="text-danger text-2xl font-raleway font-bold uppercase tracking-wide mb-12 md:text-base md:px-4 md:text-center">
				Quickly Extract Text of Any Webpage
			</h3>
			<div className="flex flex-col justify-between items-center w-full md:items-center">
				<div className="flex w-full justify-center md:flex-col md:w-5/6">
					<input
						type="text"
						className="border border-primary outline-none w-2/5 px-4 py-2 rounded-sm bg-lightGrey text-secondary font-bold font-raleway md:w-full"
						placeholder="Paste the article link..."
						onChange={e => setUrl(e.target.value)}
					/>
					<button
						className="outline-none border border-active font-bold font-raleway ml-4 px-12 py-2 rounded-sm bg-active text-primary transition duration-300 hover:bg-bc hover:text-secondary hover:border-secondary md:h-16 md:my-12 md:ml-0"
						onClick={fetchExtractedContent}
					>
						Extract Text
					</button>
				</div>
				{extractedText && (
					<textarea
						type="text"
						className="bg-lightGrey text-secondary border border-primary outline-none w-3/5 h-96 mt-12 px-4 py-2 rounded-sm font-raleway md:w-5/6 md:mt-2 md: h-48"
						value={extractedText}
					/>
				)}
			</div>
			<div className="absolute bottom-0 flex justify-center items-end h-52 md:h-44">
				<p className="text-secondary pb-12 md:w-60 md:text-center">
					Made by RapidAPI DevRel Team –{' '}
					<a href="https://github.com/RapidAPI/DevRel-Examples-External">
						<span className="transition duration-300 hover:text-active">
							See Examples Like this
						</span>
					</a>
				</p>
			</div>
		</div>
	);
}

You can see that I have created a function, fetchExtractedContent, for fetching the article from the webpage. I have also created a piece of UI that is conditionally rendering on the screen based on the value of extractedText state variable.

Wrap Up

That’s it. We have successfully built a Text Extraction App using TextAPI](https://rapidapi.com/textapi/api/textapi/). You can find the source code here of this web app.

In the end, it will look something like this:

Text Extraction App built with Next.js and TextAPI