Which python packages can I use to find out out on which page a specific “search string” is located ?
I looked into several python pdf packages but couldn't figure out which one I should use. PyPDF does not seem to have this functionality and PDFMiner seems to be an overkill for such simple task. Any advice ?
More precise: I have several PDF documents and I would like to extract pages which are between a string “Begin” and a string “End” .
I finally figured out that pyPDF can help. I am posting it in case it can help somebody else.
(1) a function to locate the string
def fnPDF_FindText(xFile, xString):
# xfile : the PDF file in which to look
# xString : the string to look for
import pyPdf, re
PageFound = -1
pdfDoc = pyPdf.PdfFileReader(file(xFile, "rb"))
for i in range(0, pdfDoc.getNumPages()):
content = ""
content += pdfDoc.getPage(i).extractText() + "\n"
content1 = content.encode('ascii', 'ignore').lower()
ResSearch = re.search(xString, content1)
if ResSearch is not None:
PageFound = i
break
return PageFound
(2) a function to extract the pages of interest
def fnPDF_ExtractPages(xFileNameOriginal, xFileNameOutput, xPageStart, xPageEnd):
from pyPdf import PdfFileReader, PdfFileWriter
output = PdfFileWriter()
pdfOne = PdfFileReader(file(xFileNameOriginal, "rb"))
for i in range(xPageStart, xPageEnd):
output.addPage(pdfOne.getPage(i))
outputStream = file(xFileNameOutput, "wb")
output.write(outputStream)
outputStream.close()
I hope this will be helpful to somebody else