How can I use Tika package(https://github.com/chrismattmann/tika-python) in python(2.7) to parse PDF files?

Question

I\'m trying to parse a few PDF files that contain engineering drawings to obtain text data in the files. I tried using TIKA as a jar with python and using it with the jnius

Answer 1

The solution given by Chris Mattmann is right. However, I would like to add a couple of inputs. Use the following code snippet to write the read PDF file into a text file. Use appropriate encoding to support UTF-8 (for example, Chinese/Japanese characters).

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import tika

tika.initVM()
from tika import parser

parsed_pdf = parser.from_file('file.pdf')

with open('file.txt', 'w', encoding='utf-8') as file:
     file.write(parsed_pdf["content"])