Can't get text out of PDF file with PyPDF2 - python

I am trying to get the text from a PDF file I downloaded with PyPDF.
Here is my code:
if not PyPDF2.PdfFileReader('download.pdf').isEncrypted:
PyPDF2.PdfFileReader('download.pdf').getPage(0).extractText()
This is the output:
'\n\n˘ˇ˘ˆ˙\n˝˛˚˜!\n\n\n\n#\nˇ˘ˆ˙ˆ˝˛˝\n˙˙˘ ˘ˆ"˝\n$!%˙(˝)˙*˜+,˝-.#/.(#0)0)/.1.+02345.\n˛˛ˇ/#.$/0/70/#.+322.32˙˘˛˘˘\n˛˘ 8˙˘9:˘ˆ;\n˛˘\n\n˝=\n˙˘˛\n.ˇ<9:˘ˇˇ%˘˛ˇ ˘˘<˘\n˝>"?˝˘$#<˘*ˆˆ˘˙˘A˘B˘˙˘˛ˇ!˛˘˙˘˛ˇ˘\n1C˙ˆ˘06˛˘8+˛9:˘D10+E˝ˆ˘8\n$˘˘9:˘˘1C˙ˆ˘+˘F˛˘D$1+FE˝˘˛˘˘<˘?˝\n////)*˘1˘˛ ?GG˜*HI\nD˘˙A˘E\nJ$\n˛\nDLE///M˛˝˛˙˘˛˘˛\n˛˘˛>"?\n˙˘˛\n˛\n/)M6;˝˛˙˘˛˘\n˛\n///˛\n\n'
When I open the file its content is fine. Also when I use another program to transform pdf into txt it works fine. It is a javascript rendered pdf on a webpage, don't know if it makes any difference.


Under Win 7, Python 3.6, I had the problem that PyPDF2 did not properly encode some PDF files. My solution was to use pdfminer.six.
pip install pdfminer.six
To extract text from a PDF, you can use functions such as the one in this post: https://stackoverflow.com/a/42154976/9524424
Worked perfect for me...


The following is taken from the documentation (https://pythonhosted.org/PyPDF2/PageObject.html)
extractText() Locate all text drawing commands, in the order they are
provided in the content stream, and extract the text. This works well
for some PDF files, but poorly for others, depending on the generator
used. This will be refined in the future. Do not rely on the order of
text coming out of this function, as it will change if this function
is made more sophisticated. Returns: a unicode string object.
So, it seems that the performance of this function depends on the pdf itself.

Related

Unable to print pdf created by PyPDF2

I created a modified pdf using the python library PyPDF2 but when I try to print it using my printer all I get is a set of blank pages. The Adobe Reader is also not able to read the newly created PDF file which makes me think that most probably the pdf is being read by the printer but the format is inappropriate for printing. And the problem is I don't have much knowledge about PDFs and their formats.
For example a pdf that does print has a format:
And for the pdf that I created and which doesn't print, the format is:
Hence, I would like to know what is the problem with the PDF I created using PyPDF2 and how can I fix it for printing it.
Edit:
The code used by me can be seen here on my previous post.

How to convert docx file to .chm using Python

I want to convert contents(text, images, links) of docx file to .chm file using Python. Can anyone please suggest how to do.
I tried to read the docx file content using docx2txt
https://github.com/ankushshah89/python-docx2txt package. But I am not sure how to read the images and links in the file.
Can someone please suggest how to read each content separately and convert it to .chm file.

You maybe warned this has a learn curve.
You need to extract all sections from your Word document into clean HTML files including the graphic files.
Please try to Save Word as HTML. But I think this don't make clean HTML.
You need the Microsoft Htmlhelp compiler for creating Chm files. I recommend using a converter tool or a Help Authoring Tool (Hat) for your task.
Search by Google for such tool "DoctoChm" and give it a try for your needs.

I recently needed to convert some resumes to plain text. There are any number of use cases for wanting to extract readable text from binary formats.
you can see the url 'http://davidmburke.com/2014/02/04/python-convert-documents-doc-docx-odt-pdf-to-plain-text-without-libreoffice/'

Can't convert pdf to text even though trying pdfminer, pdf2txt, textract in Python

I'm having a trouble extracting text from pdf files which were originally converted from InDesign and Illustrator. I'm working on a project that needs data from these pdf files. I have tried pdfminer, pdf2txt libs in Python, but none of them works in this case. For regular pdf, it works perfectly. However, for these special pdf files, it just gives blank spaces. Could anyone help me out with this? Thanks.

Python text extraction does not work on some pdfs

I am trying to read a pdf through url. I followed many stackoverflow suggestions and used PyPdf2 FileReader to extract text from the pdf.
My code looks like this :
url = "http://kat.kar.nic.in:8080/uploadedFiles/C_13052015_ch1_l1.pdf"
#url = "http://kat.kar.nic.in:8080/uploadedFiles/C_06052015_ch1_l1.pdf"
f = urlopen(Request(url)).read()
fileInput = StringIO(f)
pdf = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(fileInput)
print pdf.getNumPages()
print pdf.getDocumentInfo()
print pdf.getPage(1).extractText()
I am able to successfully extract text for first link. But if I use the same program for the second pdf. I do not get any text. The page numbers and document info seem to show up.
I tried extracting text from Pdfminer through terminal and was able to extract text from the second pdf.
Any idea what is wrong with the pdf or is there a drawback with the libraries I am using ?

If you read the comments in the pyPDF documentation you'll see that it's written right there that this functionality will not work well for some PDF files; in other words, you're looking at a restriction of the library.
Looking at the two PDF files, I can't see anything wrong with the files themselves. But...
The first file contains fully embedded fonts
The second file contains subsetted fonts
This means that the second file is more difficult to extract text from and the library probably doesn't support that properly. Just for reference I did a text extraction with callas pdfToolbox (caution, I'm affiliated with this tool) which uses the Acrobat text extraction and the text is properly extracted for both files (confirming that it's not the PDF files that are the problem).

Python to read PDF files [duplicate]

This question already has answers here:
How to extract text from a PDF file?
(33 answers)
Closed 1 year ago.
I have found many posts where solutions to read PDFs has been proposed. I want to read a PDF file word by word and do some processing on it. people suggest pdfMiner which converts entire PDF file into text file. But what i want is that to read PDFs word by word. Can anyone suggest a library that does this?

Possibly the fastest way to do this is to first convert your pdf inta a text file using pdftotext (on pdfMiner's site, there's a statement that pdfMiner is 20 times slower than pdftotext) and afterwards parse the text file as usual.
Also, when you said "I want to read a pdf file word by word and do some processing on it", you didn't specify if you want to do processing based on words in a pdf file, or do you actually want to modify the pdf file itself. If it's the second case, then you've got an entirely different problem on your hands.

I'm using pdfminer and it is an excellent lib especially if you're comfortable programming in python. It reads PDF and extracts every character, and it provides its bounding box as a tuple (x0,y0,x1,y1). Pdfminer will extract rectangles, lines and some images, and will try to detect words. It has an unpleasant O(N^3) routine that analyses bounding boxes to coalesce them, so it can get very slow on some files. Try to convert your typical file - maybe it'll be fast for you, or maybe it'll take 1 hour, depends on the file.
You can easily dump a pdf out as text, that's the first thing you should try for your application. You can also dump XML (see below), but you can't modify PDF. XML is the most complete representation of the PDF you can get out of it.
You have to read through the examples to use it in your python code, it doesn't have much documentation.
The example that comes with PdfMiner that transforms PDF into xml shows best how to use the lib in your code. It also shows you what's extracted in human-readable (as far as xml goes) form.
You can call it with parameters that tell it to "analyze" the pdf. If you do, it'll coalesce letters into blocks of text (words and sentences; sentences will have spaces so it's easy to tokenize into words in python).

Whereas I really liked the pdfminer answer I'd say that packages are not the same over time. Currenlty pdfminer still not support Python3 and may need to be updated.
So, to update the subject -even if an answer have been already voted- I'd propose to go pdfrw, from the website :
Version 0.3 is tested and works on Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.3, 3.4, and 3.5
Operations include subsetting, merging, rotating, modifying metadata,etc
The fastest pure Python PDF parser available Has been used for years by a printer in pre-press production
Can be used with rst2pdf to faithfully reproduce vector images
Can be used either standalone, or in conjunction with reportlab to reuse existing PDFs in new ones
Permissively licensed

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