How to read line by line in pdf file using PyPdf?

Question

I have some code to read from a pdf file. Is there a way to read line by line from the pdf file (not pages) using Pypdf, Python 2.6, on Windows?

Here is the code for

Answer 1

import pyPdf  
def getPDFContent(path):
    content = ""
    num_pages = 10
    p = file(path, "rb")
    pdf = pyPdf.PdfFileReader(p)
    for i in range(0, num_pages):
        content += pdf.getPage(i).extractText() + "\n"
    content = " ".join(content.replace(u"\xa0", " ").strip().split())     
    return content 

Answer 2

Looks like what you have is a large chunk of text data that you want to interpret line-by-line.

You can use the StringIO class to wrap that content as a seekable file-like object:

>>> import StringIO
>>> content = 'big\nugly\ncontents\nof\nmultiple\npdf files'
>>> buf = StringIO.StringIO(content)
>>> buf.readline()
'big\n'
>>> buf.readline()
'ugly\n'
>>> buf.readline()
'contents\n'
>>> buf.readline()
'of\n'
>>> buf.readline()
'multiple\n'
>>> buf.readline()
'pdf files'
>>> buf.seek(0)
>>> buf.readline()
'big\n'

In your case, do:

from StringIO import StringIO

# Read each line of the PDF
pdfContent = StringIO(getPDFContent("test.pdf").encode("ascii", "ignore"))
for line in pdfContent:
    doSomething(line.strip())

Answer 3

Using yield and PdfFileReader.pages can simplify things,

from pyPdf import PdfFileReader

def get_pdf_content_lines(pdf_file_path):
    with open(pdf_file_path) as f:
        pdf_reader = PdfFileReader(f)
        for page in pdf_reader.pages: 
            for line in page.extractText().splitlines():
                yield line

for line in get_pdf_content_lines('/path/to/file.pdf'):
    print line

---

In addition, Some may google "python get pdf content text" so here's how: (this is how i got here)

from pyPdf import PdfFileReader

def get_pdf_content(pdf_file_path):
    with open(pdf_file_path) as f:
        pdf_reader = PdfFileReader(f)
        content = "\n".join(page.extractText().strip() for page in pdf_reader.pages)
        content = ' '.join(content.split())
        return content


print get_pdf_content('/path/to/file.pdf')