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

can you please share the file you are looking at? The easiest way to do this would be to perhaps attach it to a Github issue in my repository, etc.

That said, if you are trying to use OCR and Tika, you need to run through the Tika OCR guide (http://wiki.apache.org/tika/TikaOCR) and get Tesseract installed. Once Tesseract is installed, then you need to double check whether or not you have an instance of tika-server running (e.g., ps aux | grep tika). If you do, kill it (tika-python runs the Tika REST server in the background as its main interface to Tika; having a fresh running version of it after Tesseract OCR is installed helps to eliminate any odd possibilities).

After you have Tesseract OCR installed, no tika-server running, start your python2.7 interpreter (or script), and then do something like:

from tika import parser
parsed = parser.from_file('/path/to/file')
print parsed["content"] # should be the text returned from OCR

HTH! --Chris

Answer 2

You need to download the Tika Server Jar and run it first. Check this link: http://wiki.apache.org/tika/TikaJAXRS

1. Download the Jar
2. Store it somewhere and run it as java -jar tika-server-x.x.jar --port xxxx
3. In your Code you now don't need to do the tika.initVM() Add tika.TikaClientOnly = True instead of tika.initVM()
4. Change parsed = parser.from_file('/path/to/file') to parsed = parser.from_file('/path/to/file', '/path/to/server') You will get the server path in Step 2. when the tika server initiates - just plug that in here

Good luck!

Answer 3

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"])

Answer 4

I never tried python tikq , but pyjnius is working fine for me. Here is my code:

def parse_file(filename):
   """
   Import TIKA classes and parse input filename
   """

   import os
   os.environ['CLASSPATH'] = "/path/to/tika-app.jar"
   from jnius import autoclass
   from jnius import JavaException

   # Import the Java classes 
   Tika = autoclass('org.apache.tika.Tika')
   Metadata = autoclass('org.apache.tika.metadata.Metadata')
   FileInputStream = autoclass('java.io.FileInputStream')

   tika = Tika()
   tika.setMaxStringLength(10*1024*1024);
   meta = Metadata()

   # Raise an exception and continue if parsing fails
   try:
       text = tika.parseToString(FileInputStream(filename), meta)
       return text
   except (JavaException,UnicodeDecodeError), e:
       print "ERROR: %s" % (e)
   return None

Answer 5

Install tika with the following pip command:

pip install tika

The following code works fine for extracting data:

import io
import os
from tika import parser

def extract_text(file):
    parsed = parser.from_file(file)
    parsed_text = parsed['content']
    parsed_text = parsed_text.lower()
    return parsed_text

file_name_with_extension = input("Enter File Name:")
text = extract_text(file_name_with_extension)
print(text)

It will print only content of the file. Supported file formats are listed here.