How to extract text from a PDF file?

Question

I\'m trying to extract the text included in this PDF file using Python.

I\'m using the PyPDF2 module, and have the following script:

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Answer 1

After trying textract (which seemed to have too many dependencies) and pypdf2 (which could not extract text from the pdfs I tested with) and tika (which was too slow) I ended up using pdftotext from xpdf (as already suggested in another answer) and just called the binary from python directly (you may need to adapt the path to pdftotext):

import os, subprocess
SCRIPT_DIR = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))
args = ["/usr/local/bin/pdftotext",
        '-enc',
        'UTF-8',
        "{}/my-pdf.pdf".format(SCRIPT_DIR),
        '-']
res = subprocess.run(args, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
output = res.stdout.decode('utf-8')

There is pdftotext which does basically the same but this assumes pdftotext in /usr/local/bin whereas I am using this in AWS lambda and wanted to use it from the current directory.

Btw: For using this on lambda you need to put the binary and the dependency to libstdc++.so into your lambda function. I personally needed to compile xpdf. As instructions for this would blow up this answer I put them on my personal blog.