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

For extracting Text from PDF use below code

import PyPDF2
pdfFileObj = open('mypdf.pdf', 'rb')

pdfReader = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(pdfFileObj)

print(pdfReader.numPages)

pageObj = pdfReader.getPage(0)

a = pageObj.extractText()

print(a)

Answer 2

You can use PDFtoText https://github.com/jalan/pdftotext

PDF to text keeps text format indentation, doesn't matter if you have tables.

Answer 3

If wanting to extract text from a table, I've found tabula to be easily implemented, accurate, and fast:

to get a pandas dataframe:

import tabula

df = tabula.read_pdf('your.pdf')

df

By default, it ignores page content outside of the table. So far, I've only tested on a single-page, single-table file, but there are kwargs to accommodate multiple pages and/or multiple tables.

install via:

pip install tabula-py
# or
conda install -c conda-forge tabula-py 

In terms of straight-up text extraction see: https://stackoverflow.com/a/63190886/9249533

Answer 4

I am adding code to accomplish this: It is working fine for me:

# This works in python 3
# required python packages
# tabula-py==1.0.0
# PyPDF2==1.26.0
# Pillow==4.0.0
# pdfminer.six==20170720

import os
import shutil
import warnings
from io import StringIO

import requests
import tabula
from PIL import Image
from PyPDF2 import PdfFileWriter, PdfFileReader
from pdfminer.converter import TextConverter
from pdfminer.layout import LAParams
from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager, PDFPageInterpreter
from pdfminer.pdfpage import PDFPage

warnings.filterwarnings("ignore")


def download_file(url):
    local_filename = url.split('/')[-1]
    local_filename = local_filename.replace("%20", "_")
    r = requests.get(url, stream=True)
    print(r)
    with open(local_filename, 'wb') as f:
        shutil.copyfileobj(r.raw, f)

    return local_filename


class PDFExtractor():
    def __init__(self, url):
        self.url = url

    # Downloading File in local
    def break_pdf(self, filename, start_page=-1, end_page=-1):
        pdf_reader = PdfFileReader(open(filename, "rb"))
        # Reading each pdf one by one
        total_pages = pdf_reader.numPages
        if start_page == -1:
            start_page = 0
        elif start_page < 1 or start_page > total_pages:
            return "Start Page Selection Is Wrong"
        else:
            start_page = start_page - 1

        if end_page == -1:
            end_page = total_pages
        elif end_page < 1 or end_page > total_pages - 1:
            return "End Page Selection Is Wrong"
        else:
            end_page = end_page

        for i in range(start_page, end_page):
            output = PdfFileWriter()
            output.addPage(pdf_reader.getPage(i))
            with open(str(i + 1) + "_" + filename, "wb") as outputStream:
                output.write(outputStream)

    def extract_text_algo_1(self, file):
        pdf_reader = PdfFileReader(open(file, 'rb'))
        # creating a page object
        pageObj = pdf_reader.getPage(0)

        # extracting extract_text from page
        text = pageObj.extractText()
        text = text.replace("\n", "").replace("\t", "")
        return text

    def extract_text_algo_2(self, file):
        pdfResourceManager = PDFResourceManager()
        retstr = StringIO()
        la_params = LAParams()
        device = TextConverter(pdfResourceManager, retstr, codec='utf-8', laparams=la_params)
        fp = open(file, 'rb')
        interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(pdfResourceManager, device)
        password = ""
        max_pages = 0
        caching = True
        page_num = set()

        for page in PDFPage.get_pages(fp, page_num, maxpages=max_pages, password=password, caching=caching,
                                      check_extractable=True):
            interpreter.process_page(page)

        text = retstr.getvalue()
        text = text.replace("\t", "").replace("\n", "")

        fp.close()
        device.close()
        retstr.close()
        return text

    def extract_text(self, file):
        text1 = self.extract_text_algo_1(file)
        text2 = self.extract_text_algo_2(file)

        if len(text2) > len(str(text1)):
            return text2
        else:
            return text1

    def extarct_table(self, file):

        # Read pdf into DataFrame
        try:
            df = tabula.read_pdf(file, output_format="csv")
        except:
            print("Error Reading Table")
            return

        print("\nPrinting Table Content: \n", df)
        print("\nDone Printing Table Content\n")

    def tiff_header_for_CCITT(self, width, height, img_size, CCITT_group=4):
        tiff_header_struct = '<' + '2s' + 'h' + 'l' + 'h' + 'hhll' * 8 + 'h'
        return struct.pack(tiff_header_struct,
                           b'II',  # Byte order indication: Little indian
                           42,  # Version number (always 42)
                           8,  # Offset to first IFD
                           8,  # Number of tags in IFD
                           256, 4, 1, width,  # ImageWidth, LONG, 1, width
                           257, 4, 1, height,  # ImageLength, LONG, 1, lenght
                           258, 3, 1, 1,  # BitsPerSample, SHORT, 1, 1
                           259, 3, 1, CCITT_group,  # Compression, SHORT, 1, 4 = CCITT Group 4 fax encoding
                           262, 3, 1, 0,  # Threshholding, SHORT, 1, 0 = WhiteIsZero
                           273, 4, 1, struct.calcsize(tiff_header_struct),  # StripOffsets, LONG, 1, len of header
                           278, 4, 1, height,  # RowsPerStrip, LONG, 1, lenght
                           279, 4, 1, img_size,  # StripByteCounts, LONG, 1, size of extract_image
                           0  # last IFD
                           )

    def extract_image(self, filename):
        number = 1
        pdf_reader = PdfFileReader(open(filename, 'rb'))

        for i in range(0, pdf_reader.numPages):

            page = pdf_reader.getPage(i)

            try:
                xObject = page['/Resources']['/XObject'].getObject()
            except:
                print("No XObject Found")
                return

            for obj in xObject:

                try:

                    if xObject[obj]['/Subtype'] == '/Image':
                        size = (xObject[obj]['/Width'], xObject[obj]['/Height'])
                        data = xObject[obj]._data
                        if xObject[obj]['/ColorSpace'] == '/DeviceRGB':
                            mode = "RGB"
                        else:
                            mode = "P"

                        image_name = filename.split(".")[0] + str(number)

                        print(xObject[obj]['/Filter'])

                        if xObject[obj]['/Filter'] == '/FlateDecode':
                            data = xObject[obj].getData()
                            img = Image.frombytes(mode, size, data)
                            img.save(image_name + "_Flate.png")
                            # save_to_s3(imagename + "_Flate.png")
                            print("Image_Saved")

                            number += 1
                        elif xObject[obj]['/Filter'] == '/DCTDecode':
                            img = open(image_name + "_DCT.jpg", "wb")
                            img.write(data)
                            # save_to_s3(imagename + "_DCT.jpg")
                            img.close()
                            number += 1
                        elif xObject[obj]['/Filter'] == '/JPXDecode':
                            img = open(image_name + "_JPX.jp2", "wb")
                            img.write(data)
                            # save_to_s3(imagename + "_JPX.jp2")
                            img.close()
                            number += 1
                        elif xObject[obj]['/Filter'] == '/CCITTFaxDecode':
                            if xObject[obj]['/DecodeParms']['/K'] == -1:
                                CCITT_group = 4
                            else:
                                CCITT_group = 3
                            width = xObject[obj]['/Width']
                            height = xObject[obj]['/Height']
                            data = xObject[obj]._data  # sorry, getData() does not work for CCITTFaxDecode
                            img_size = len(data)
                            tiff_header = self.tiff_header_for_CCITT(width, height, img_size, CCITT_group)
                            img_name = image_name + '_CCITT.tiff'
                            with open(img_name, 'wb') as img_file:
                                img_file.write(tiff_header + data)

                            # save_to_s3(img_name)
                            number += 1
                except:
                    continue

        return number

    def read_pages(self, start_page=-1, end_page=-1):

        # Downloading file locally
        downloaded_file = download_file(self.url)
        print(downloaded_file)

        # breaking PDF into number of pages in diff pdf files
        self.break_pdf(downloaded_file, start_page, end_page)

        # creating a pdf reader object
        pdf_reader = PdfFileReader(open(downloaded_file, 'rb'))

        # Reading each pdf one by one
        total_pages = pdf_reader.numPages

        if start_page == -1:
            start_page = 0
        elif start_page < 1 or start_page > total_pages:
            return "Start Page Selection Is Wrong"
        else:
            start_page = start_page - 1

        if end_page == -1:
            end_page = total_pages
        elif end_page < 1 or end_page > total_pages - 1:
            return "End Page Selection Is Wrong"
        else:
            end_page = end_page

        for i in range(start_page, end_page):
            # creating a page based filename
            file = str(i + 1) + "_" + downloaded_file

            print("\nStarting to Read Page: ", i + 1, "\n -----------===-------------")

            file_text = self.extract_text(file)
            print(file_text)
            self.extract_image(file)

            self.extarct_table(file)
            os.remove(file)
            print("Stopped Reading Page: ", i + 1, "\n -----------===-------------")

        os.remove(downloaded_file)


# I have tested on these 3 pdf files
# url = "http://s3.amazonaws.com/NLP_Project/Original_Documents/Healthcare-January-2017.pdf"
url = "http://s3.amazonaws.com/NLP_Project/Original_Documents/Sample_Test.pdf"
# url = "http://s3.amazonaws.com/NLP_Project/Original_Documents/Sazerac_FS_2017_06_30%20Annual.pdf"
# creating the instance of class
pdf_extractor = PDFExtractor(url)

# Getting desired data out
pdf_extractor.read_pages(15, 23)

Answer 5

I've try many Python PDF converters, and I like to update this review. Tika is one of the best. But PyMuPDF is a good news from @ehsaneha user.

I did a code to compare them in: https://github.com/erfelipe/PDFtextExtraction I hope to help you.

Tika-Python is a Python binding to the Apache Tika™ REST services allowing Tika to be called natively in the Python community.

from tika import parser

raw = parser.from_file("///Users/Documents/Textos/Texto1.pdf")
raw = str(raw)

safe_text = raw.encode('utf-8', errors='ignore')

safe_text = str(safe_text).replace("\n", "").replace("\\", "")
print('--- safe text ---' )
print( safe_text )

Answer 6

How to extract text from a PDF file?

The first thing to understand is the PDF format. It has a public specification written in English, see ISO 32000-2:2017 and read the more than 700 pages of PDF 1.7 specification. You certainly at least need to read the wikipedia page about PDF

Once you understood the details of the PDF format, extracting text is more or less easy (but what about text appearing in figures or images; its figure 1)? Don't expect writing a perfect software text extractor alone in a few weeks....

On Linux, you might also use pdf2text which you could popen from your Python code.

In general, extracting text from a PDF file is an ill defined problem. For a human reader some text could be made (as a figure) from different dots, or a photo, etc...

The Google search engine is capable of extracting text from PDF, but is rumored to need more than half a billion lines of source code. Do you have the necessary resources (in man power, in budget) to develop a competitor?

A possibility might be to print the PDF to some virtual printer (e.g. using GhostScript or Firefox), then to use OCR techniques to extract text.

I would recommend instead to work on the data representation which has generated that PDF file, for example on the original LaTeX code (or Lout code) or on OOXML code.

In all cases, you need to budget at least several person years of software development.