How to get Hocr output using python-tesseract

Question

I had been getting really good results using pytesseract but it is not able to preserve double spaces and they are really important for me. And, so i decided to retrieve hocr output rather than pure text.But;there doesn't appear to be any way of specifying config file using pytessearct.

So, is it possible to specify cofiguration file using pytesseract or is there some default config file that i can change to get hocr output?

#run method from pytessearct.py
def run_tesseract(input_filename, output_filename_base, lang=None, boxes=False, config=None):
    '''
    runs the command:
        `tesseract_cmd` `input_filename` `output_filename_base`

    returns the exit status of tesseract, as well as tesseract's stderr output

    '''
    command = [tesseract_cmd, input_filename, output_filename_base]

    if lang is not None:
        command += ['-l', lang]

    if boxes:
        command += ['batch.nochop', 'makebox']

    if config:
        command += shlex.split(config)
    #command+=['C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Tesseract-OCR\\tessdata\\configs\\hocr']
    #print "command:",command
    proc = subprocess.Popen(command,
            stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
    return (proc.wait(), proc.stderr.read())

Answer 1

You can use this another library to use Tesseract in Python: pyslibtesseract

Image:

Code:

import pyslibtesseract

tesseract_config = pyslibtesseract.TesseractConfig(psm=pyslibtesseract.PageSegMode.PSM_SINGLE_LINE, hocr=True)
print(pyslibtesseract.LibTesseract.simple_read(tesseract_config, 'phrase0.png'))

Output:

  <div class='ocr_page' id='page_1' title='image ""; bbox 0 0 319 33; ppageno 0'>
   <div class='ocr_carea' id='block_1_1' title="bbox 0 0 319 33">
    <p class='ocr_par' dir='ltr' id='par_1_1' title="bbox 10 13 276 25">
     <span class='ocr_line' id='line_1_1' title="bbox 10 13 276 25; baseline 0 0"><span class='ocrx_word' id='word_1_1' title='bbox 10 14 41 25; x_wconf 75' lang='eng' dir='ltr'><strong>the</strong></span> <span class='ocrx_word' id='word_1_2' title='bbox 53 13 97 25; x_wconf 84' lang='eng' dir='ltr'><strong>book</strong></span> <span class='ocrx_word' id='word_1_3' title='bbox 111 13 129 25; x_wconf 79' lang='eng' dir='ltr'><strong>is</strong></span> <span class='ocrx_word' id='word_1_4' title='bbox 143 17 164 25; x_wconf 83' lang='eng' dir='ltr'>on</span> <span class='ocrx_word' id='word_1_5' title='bbox 178 14 209 25; x_wconf 75' lang='eng' dir='ltr'><strong>the</strong></span> <span class='ocrx_word' id='word_1_6' title='bbox 223 14 276 25; x_wconf 76' lang='eng' dir='ltr'><strong>table</strong></span> 
     </span>
    </p>
   </div>
  </div>