How to extract text from pdf in Python 3.7

Question

I am trying to extract text from a PDF file using Python. My main goal is I am trying to create a program that reads a bank statement and extracts its text to update an excel file to easily record monthly spendings. Right now I am focusing just extracting the text from the pdf file but I don't know how to do so.

What is currently the best and easiest way to extract text from a PDF file into a string? What library is best to use today and how can I do it?

I have tried using PyPDF2 but everytime I try to extract text from any page using extractText(), it returns empty strings. I have tried installing textract but I get errors because I need more libraries I think.

import PyPDF2

pdfFileObj = open("January2019.pdf", 'rb')
pdfReader = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(pdfFileObj)

pageObj = pdfReader.getPage(0)
print(pageObj.extractText())

This prints empty strings when it should be printing the contents of the page

Answer 1

I have tried many methods but failed, include PyPDF2 and Tika. I finally found the module pdfplumber that is work for me, you also can try it.

Hope this will be helpful to you.

import pdfplumber
pdf = pdfplumber.open('pdffile.pdf')
page = pdf.pages[0]
text = page.extract_text()
print(text)
pdf.close()

Answer 2

Using tika worked for me!

from tika import parser

rawText = parser.from_file('January2019.pdf')

rawList = rawText['content'].splitlines()

This made it really easy to extract separate each line in the bank statement into a list.