How to check if PDF is scanned image or contains text

python python-3.x pypdf2 pdfminer pdf-extraction
Jinu Joseph picture Jinu Joseph · Apr 16, 2019 · Viewed 12k times · Source

I have a large number of files, some of them are scanned images into PDF and some are full/partial text PDF.

Is there a way to check these files to ensure that we are only processing files which are scanned images and not those that are full/partial text PDF files?

environment: PYTHON 3.6

Answer

Rahul Agarwal picture Rahul Agarwal · Apr 16, 2019

The below code will work, to extract data text data from both searchable and non-searchable PDF's.

import fitz

text = ""
path = "Your_scanned_or_partial_scanned.pdf"

doc = fitz.open(path)
for page in doc:
    text += page.getText()

If you don't have fitz module you need to do this:

pip install --upgrade pymupdf

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