How to access data from pdf forms with python?

Question

I need to access data from pdf form fields. I tried the package PyPDF2 with this code:

import PyPDF2

reader = PyPDF2.PdfReader('formular.pdf')
print(reader.pages[0].extract_text())

But this gives me only the text of the normal pdf data, not the form fields.

Does anyone know how to read text from the form fields?

Asked By: Antonio Kallai

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Source

Answer 1

There are library in python through which you can access pdf data. As pdf is not a raw data like csv, txt,tsv etc. So python can’t directly read data inside pdf files.

There is a python library name as slate Slate documentation. Read this documentation. I hope you will get answer to your question.

Answered By: Anurag Misra

Answer 2

You can use the getFormTextFields() method to return a dictionary of form fields (see https://pythonhosted.org/PyPDF2/PdfFileReader.html). Use the dictionary keys (the field name) to access the values (the field values).The following example might help:

from PyPDF2 import PdfFileReader

infile = "myInputPdf.pdf"
pdf_reader = PdfFileReader(open(infile, "rb"))

dictionary = pdf_reader.getFormTextFields() # returns a python dictionary
my_field_value = str(dictionary['my_field_name']) # use field name (dictionary key) to access field value (dictionary value)

Answered By: tromar

How to access data from pdf forms with python?

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