Python module for converting PDF to text [closed]

Question

Is there any python module to convert PDF files into text? I tried one piece of code found in Activestate which uses pypdf but the text generated had no space between and was of no use.

Answer 1

Try PDFMiner. It can extract text from PDF files as HTML, SGML or "Tagged PDF" format.

The Tagged PDF format seems to be the cleanest, and stripping out the XML tags leaves just the bare text.

A Python 3 version is available under:

• https://github.com/pdfminer/pdfminer.six

Answer 2

The PDFMiner package has changed since codeape posted.

EDIT (again):

PDFMiner has been updated again in version 20100213

You can check the version you have installed with the following:

>>> import pdfminer >>> pdfminer.__version__ '20100213' 

Here's the updated version (with comments on what I changed/added):

def pdf_to_csv(filename):     from cStringIO import StringIO  #<-- added so you can copy/paste this to try it     from pdfminer.converter import LTTextItem, TextConverter     from pdfminer.pdfparser import PDFDocument, PDFParser     from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager, PDFPageInterpreter      class CsvConverter(TextConverter):         def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):             TextConverter.__init__(self, *args, **kwargs)          def end_page(self, i):             from collections import defaultdict             lines = defaultdict(lambda : {})             for child in self.cur_item.objs:                 if isinstance(child, LTTextItem):                     (_,_,x,y) = child.bbox                   #<-- changed                     line = lines[int(-y)]                     line[x] = child.text.encode(self.codec)  #<-- changed              for y in sorted(lines.keys()):                 line = lines[y]                 self.outfp.write(";".join(line[x] for x in sorted(line.keys())))                 self.outfp.write("\n")      # ... the following part of the code is a remix of the      # convert() function in the pdfminer/tools/pdf2text module     rsrc = PDFResourceManager()     outfp = StringIO()     device = CsvConverter(rsrc, outfp, codec="utf-8")  #<-- changed          # becuase my test documents are utf-8 (note: utf-8 is the default codec)      doc = PDFDocument()     fp = open(filename, 'rb')     parser = PDFParser(fp)       #<-- changed     parser.set_document(doc)     #<-- added     doc.set_parser(parser)       #<-- added     doc.initialize('')      interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrc, device)      for i, page in enumerate(doc.get_pages()):         outfp.write("START PAGE %d\n" % i)         interpreter.process_page(page)         outfp.write("END PAGE %d\n" % i)      device.close()     fp.close()      return outfp.getvalue() 

Edit (yet again):

Here is an update for the latest version in pypi, 20100619p1. In short I replaced LTTextItem with LTChar and passed an instance of LAParams to the CsvConverter constructor.

def pdf_to_csv(filename):     from cStringIO import StringIO       from pdfminer.converter import LTChar, TextConverter    #<-- changed     from pdfminer.layout import LAParams     from pdfminer.pdfparser import PDFDocument, PDFParser     from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager, PDFPageInterpreter      class CsvConverter(TextConverter):         def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):             TextConverter.__init__(self, *args, **kwargs)          def end_page(self, i):             from collections import defaultdict             lines = defaultdict(lambda : {})             for child in self.cur_item.objs:                 if isinstance(child, LTChar):               #<-- changed                     (_,_,x,y) = child.bbox                                        line = lines[int(-y)]                     line[x] = child.text.encode(self.codec)              for y in sorted(lines.keys()):                 line = lines[y]                 self.outfp.write(";".join(line[x] for x in sorted(line.keys())))                 self.outfp.write("\n")      # ... the following part of the code is a remix of the      # convert() function in the pdfminer/tools/pdf2text module     rsrc = PDFResourceManager()     outfp = StringIO()     device = CsvConverter(rsrc, outfp, codec="utf-8", laparams=LAParams())  #<-- changed         # becuase my test documents are utf-8 (note: utf-8 is the default codec)      doc = PDFDocument()     fp = open(filename, 'rb')     parser = PDFParser(fp)            parser.set_document(doc)          doc.set_parser(parser)            doc.initialize('')      interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrc, device)      for i, page in enumerate(doc.get_pages()):         outfp.write("START PAGE %d\n" % i)         if page is not None:             interpreter.process_page(page)         outfp.write("END PAGE %d\n" % i)      device.close()     fp.close()      return outfp.getvalue() 

EDIT (one more time):

Updated for version 20110515 (thanks to Oeufcoque Penteano!):

def pdf_to_csv(filename):     from cStringIO import StringIO       from pdfminer.converter import LTChar, TextConverter     from pdfminer.layout import LAParams     from pdfminer.pdfparser import PDFDocument, PDFParser     from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager, PDFPageInterpreter      class CsvConverter(TextConverter):         def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):             TextConverter.__init__(self, *args, **kwargs)          def end_page(self, i):             from collections import defaultdict             lines = defaultdict(lambda : {})             for child in self.cur_item._objs:                #<-- changed                 if isinstance(child, LTChar):                     (_,_,x,y) = child.bbox                                        line = lines[int(-y)]                     line[x] = child._text.encode(self.codec) #<-- changed              for y in sorted(lines.keys()):                 line = lines[y]                 self.outfp.write(";".join(line[x] for x in sorted(line.keys())))                 self.outfp.write("\n")      # ... the following part of the code is a remix of the      # convert() function in the pdfminer/tools/pdf2text module     rsrc = PDFResourceManager()     outfp = StringIO()     device = CsvConverter(rsrc, outfp, codec="utf-8", laparams=LAParams())         # becuase my test documents are utf-8 (note: utf-8 is the default codec)      doc = PDFDocument()     fp = open(filename, 'rb')     parser = PDFParser(fp)            parser.set_document(doc)          doc.set_parser(parser)            doc.initialize('')      interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrc, device)      for i, page in enumerate(doc.get_pages()):         outfp.write("START PAGE %d\n" % i)         if page is not None:             interpreter.process_page(page)         outfp.write("END PAGE %d\n" % i)      device.close()     fp.close()      return outfp.getvalue()