If I undestand well what you need, you can try to convert it to html and use a library like jsoup to extract the needed information.
Here is an example to extract to first bold text found in the clipboard
package rtfTest;
import java.awt.Toolkit;
import java.awt.datatransfer.Clipboard;
import java.awt.datatransfer.DataFlavor;
import java.awt.datatransfer.Transferable;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.Reader;
import java.io.StringReader;
import java.io.StringWriter;
import java.io.Writer;
import javax.swing.JEditorPane;
import javax.swing.text.BadLocationException;
import javax.swing.text.EditorKit;
import org.jsoup.Jsoup;
import org.jsoup.nodes.Document;
import org.jsoup.nodes.Element;
public class TestRtf{
public static void main (String[] args) {
TestRtf t = new TestRtf();
t.readClipboard() ;
}
@SuppressWarnings("resource")
static String streamToString(java.io.InputStream is) {
java.util.Scanner s = new java.util.Scanner(is).useDelimiter("\\A");
return s.hasNext() ? s.next() : "";
}
public static String rtfToHtml(Reader rtf) throws IOException { // From http://www.codeproject.com/Tips/136483/Java-How-to-convert-RTF-into-HTML
JEditorPane p = new JEditorPane();
p.setContentType("text/rtf");
EditorKit kitRtf = p.getEditorKitForContentType("text/rtf");
try {
kitRtf.read(rtf, p.getDocument(), 0);
kitRtf = null;
EditorKit kitHtml = p.getEditorKitForContentType("text/html");
Writer writer = new StringWriter();
kitHtml.write(writer, p.getDocument(), 0, p.getDocument().getLength());
return writer.toString();
} catch (BadLocationException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
return null;
}
public void readClipboard () {
String result;
Clipboard clipboard = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getSystemClipboard();
Transferable contents = clipboard.getContents(null);
DataFlavor dfRTF = new DataFlavor("text/rtf", "Rich Formatted Text");
DataFlavor dfTxt = DataFlavor.stringFlavor;
boolean hasTransferableRTFText = (contents != null)
&& contents.isDataFlavorSupported(dfRTF);
boolean hasTransferableTxtText = (contents != null)
&& contents.isDataFlavorSupported(dfTxt);
if (hasTransferableRTFText) {
try {
// result = streamToString((InputStream)contents.getTransferData(dfRTF));
// Convert rtf to html
result = rtfToHtml(new StringReader(streamToString((InputStream)contents.getTransferData(dfRTF))));
// Example of text extraction from html
// Parse html
Document doc = Jsoup.parse(result);
// Select first bold text
Element firstBoldElt = doc.select("b").first();
String firstBoldText = firstBoldElt.text();
System.out.println(firstBoldText);
} catch (Exception ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
}
} else if (hasTransferableTxtText) {
try {
result = (String)contents.getTransferData(dfTxt);
System.out.println("dfTxt "+ result);
} catch (Exception ex) {
ex.printStackTrace();
}
}}}