Read PDF in Python and convert to text in PDF

Question

I have used this code to convert pdf to text.

input1 = '//Home//Sai Krishna Dubagunta.pdf'
output = '//Home//Me.txt'
os.system(("pdftotext %s %s") %( input1, output))

I have created the Home directory and pasted the source file in it.

The output I get is

And no file with .txt was created. Where is the Problem?

Asked By: Krishna

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Source

Answer 1

I think pdftotext command takes only one argument. Try using:

os.system(("pdftotext %s") % input1)

and see what happens. Hope this helps.

Answered By: haraprasadj

Answer 2

Your expression

("pdftotext %s %s") %( input1, output)

will translate to

pdftotext //Home//Sai Krishna Dubagunta.pdf //Home//Me.txt

which means that the first parameter passed to pdftotext is //Home//Sai, and the second parameter is Krishna. That obviously won’t work.

Enclose the parameters in quotes:

os.system("pdftotext '%s' '%s'" % (input1, output))

Answered By: Tim Pietzcker

Answer 3

There are various Python packages to extract the text from a PDF with Python. You can see a speed/quality benchmark.

As the maintainer of pypdf and PyPDF2 I am biased, but I would recommend pypdf for people to start. It’s pure-python and a BSD 3-clause license. That should work for most people. Also pypdf can do way more with PDF files (e.g. transformations).

If you feel comfortable with the C-dependency and don’t want to modify the PDF, give pypdfium2 a shot. pypdfium2 is really fast and has an amazing extraction quality.

I previously recommended popplers pdftotext. Don’t use that. It’s quality is worse than PDFium/PyPDF2.

Tika and PyMuPDF work similarly well as PDFium, but they also have the non-python dependency. PyMuPDF might not work for you due to the commercial license.

I would NOT use pdfminer / pdfminer.six / pdfplumber/ pdftotext / borb / PyPDF2 / PyPDF3 / PyPDF4.

pypdf: Pure Python

Installation: pip install pypdf (more instructions)

from pypdf import PdfReader

reader = PdfReader("example.pdf")
text = ""
for page in reader.pages:
    text += page.extract_text() + "n"

PDFium: High quality and very fast, but with C-dependency

Installation: pip install pypdfium2

import pypdfium2 as pdfium

text = ""
pdf = pdfium.PdfDocument(data)
for i in range(len(pdf)):
    page = pdf.get_page(i)
    textpage = page.get_textpage()
    text += textpage.get_text()
    text += "n"
    [g.close() for g in (textpage, page)]
pdf.close()

Answered By: Martin Thoma

Read PDF in Python and convert to text in PDF

Question:

Answers:

pypdf: Pure Python

PDFium: High quality and very fast, but with C-dependency