I am trying to get text data from a pdf using pdfminer. I am able to extract this data to a .txt file successfully with the pdfminer command line tool pdf2txt.py. I currently do this and then use a python script to clean up the .txt file. I would like to incorporate the pdf extract process into the script and save myself a step.
I thought I was on to something when I found this link, but I didn't have success with any of the solutions. Perhaps the function listed there needs to be updated again because I am using a newer version of pdfminer.
I also tried the function shown here, but it also did not work.
Another approach I tried was to call the script within a script using os.system
. This was also unsuccessful.
I am using Python version 2.7.1 and pdfminer version 20110227.
Here is a new solution that works with the latest version:
from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager, PDFPageInterpreter
from pdfminer.converter import TextConverter
from pdfminer.layout import LAParams
from pdfminer.pdfpage import PDFPage
from cStringIO import StringIO
def convert_pdf_to_txt(path):
rsrcmgr = PDFResourceManager()
retstr = StringIO()
codec = 'utf-8'
laparams = LAParams()
device = TextConverter(rsrcmgr, retstr, codec=codec, laparams=laparams)
fp = file(path, 'rb')
interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrcmgr, device)
password = ""
maxpages = 0
caching = True
pagenos=set()
for page in PDFPage.get_pages(fp, pagenos, maxpages=maxpages, password=password,caching=caching, check_extractable=True):
interpreter.process_page(page)
fp.close()
device.close()
str = retstr.getvalue()
retstr.close()
return str