Creating bytesIO object

Question

I am working on a Scrapy spider, trying to extract the text from multiple PDF files in a directory, using slate. I have no interest in saving the actual PDF to disk, and so I\'v

Answer 1

When you do in_memory_pdf.read(response.body) you are supposed to pass the number of bytes to read. You want to initialize the buffer, not read into it.

In python 2, just initialize BytesIO as:

 in_memory_pdf = BytesIO(response.body)

In Python 3, you cannot use BytesIO with a string because it expects bytes. The error message shows that response.body is of type str: we have to encode it.

 in_memory_pdf = BytesIO(bytes(response.body,'ascii'))

But as a pdf can be binary data, I suppose that response.body would be bytes, not str. In that case, the simple in_memory_pdf = BytesIO(response.body) works.