How to read simple text from a PDF file with Python?

Question

Need to parse a PDF file in order to extract just the first initial lines of text, and have looked for different Python packages to do the job, but without any luck.

Having tried:

PDFminer, PDFminer.six and PDFminer3k, which appears to be overly complex for the simple job, and I was unable to find a simple working example
slate, got error in installation, though worked with fix from thread, but got error when trying; maybe using wrong PDFminer, but can't figure which to use
PyPDF2 and PyPDF3 but these gave garbage as described here
tika, that gave different terminal error messages and was very slow
pdftotext failed to install
pdf2text failed at "import pdf2text", and when changed to "pdftotext" failed to import with "ImportError: cannot import name 'Extractor'" even through pip list shows that "Extractor" is installed

Usually I find that installed Python packages work amazingly well, but parsing PDF to text appears to be a jungle, which the myriad of tools also indicates.

Any suggestion of how to do simple parsing of a PDF file to text in Python?

PyPDF2 example added

An example of PyPDF2 is:

import PyPDF2
pdfFileObj = open('file.pdf', 'rb')
pdfReader = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(pdfFileObj)
pageObj_0 = pdfReader.getPage(0)
print(pageObj_0.extractText())

Which returns garbage as:

$%$%&%&$'(' ˜!)"*+#

Please, don't close this question... I simply seek some Python code that works... if SO is not for that, then what is it for? — EquipDev
– EquipDev, Commented Jan 24, 2020 at 13:28

EquipDev · Accepted Answer · 2020-01-24 14:54:04Z

8

Based on pdfminer, I was able to extract the bare necessity from the pdf2txt.py script (provided with pdfminer) into a function:

import io

from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager
from pdfminer.layout import LAParams
from pdfminer.converter import TextConverter
from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFPageInterpreter
from pdfminer.pdfpage import PDFPage

def pdf_to_text(path):
    with open(path, 'rb') as fp:
        rsrcmgr = PDFResourceManager()
        outfp = io.StringIO()
        laparams = LAParams()
        device = TextConverter(rsrcmgr, outfp, laparams=laparams)
        interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrcmgr, device)
        for page in PDFPage.get_pages(fp):
            interpreter.process_page(page)
    text = outfp.getvalue()
    return text

answered Jan 24, 2020 at 14:54

EquipDev

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3 Comments

Kamil Over a year ago

I have found this solution to work fairly well but if you compare the output to the original pdf file you'll find discrepancies. Sentences are cut and reordered. Paragraphs having missing sentences, etc.

oldboy Over a year ago

@Kamil i wonder if these issues are artifacts of the specific pdf file itself or a result of how it was created in the first place

Kamil Over a year ago

@oldboy, that's a good question. I've never had much luck parsing PDFs. I actually found that converting the PDF to a simply word or txt file and then applying a parsing algorithm works out better. This is specific to parsing words only, because once you go after anything else besides text (ie. images) the process breaks down.

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