Converting a pdf to text/html in python so I can parse it

Question

I have the following sample code where I download a pdf from the European Parliament website on a given legislative proposal:

EDIT: I ended up just getting the link and

Answer 1

Sounds like you found a solution, but if you ever want to do it without a web service, or you need to scrape data based on its precise location on the PDF page, can I suggest my library, pdfquery? It basically turns the PDF into an lxml tree that can be spit out as XML, or parsed with XPath, PyQuery, or whatever else you want to use.

To use it, once you had the file saved to disk you would return pdf = pdfquery.PDFQuery(name_pdf), or pass in a urllib file object directly if you didn't need to save it. To get XML out to parse with BeautifulSoup, you could do pdf.tree.tostring().

If you don't mind using JQuery-style selectors, there's a PyQuery interface with positional extensions, which can be pretty handy. For example:

balance = pdf.pq(':contains("Your balance is")').text()
strings_near_the_bottom_of_page_23 = [el.text for el in pdf.pq('LTPage[page_label=23] :in_bbox(0, 0, 600, 200)')]