Python – Extracting text from webpage PDF

Question

So I have come across a few posts that deal with converting PDF’s to HTML or converting them to text, however they all deal with doing so from a file saved to the computer. Is there a way to extract the text from a webpage PDF without downloading the PDF file itself (as I will be doing so for a large number of files by iterating through a list of URL’s)?

I am also curious which is the best library to achieve this with. pdfkit, pdf2txt, pdfminer, etc.?

Here is an example website with the format I will be dealing with: http://www.arkansasrazorbacks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Miami-Ohio-Game-2.pdf

Asked By: rahlf23

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Source

Answer 1

You can download the file as a byte stream with requests wrapping it with io.BytesIO(), just so:

import io

import requests
from pyPdf import PdfFileReader

url = 'http://www.arkansasrazorbacks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Miami-Ohio-Game-2.pdf'

r = requests.get(url)
f = io.BytesIO(r.content)

reader = PdfFileReader(f)
contents = reader.getPage(0).extractText().split('n')

f is a file like object you can use just like you opened a PDF file. this way the file is only in the memory and never saved locally.

In order to get text from the PDF file you can use PyPdf.

Answered By: Dror Av.

Answer 2

Updated the code for the PyPDF2 library

import io
import requests
import PyPDF2

url = 'http://www.arkansasrazorbacks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Miami-Ohio-Game-2.pdf'

r = requests.get(url)
f = io.BytesIO(r.content)

reader = PyPDF2.PdfReader(f)
contents = reader.pages[2].extract_text().split('n')

Answered By: Andriy125

Python – Extracting text from webpage PDF

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