All of you must be familiar with what PDFs are. In fact, they are one of the most important and widely used digital media. PDF stands for Portable Document Format. It uses .pdf extension. It is used to present and exchange documents reliably, independent of software, hardware, or operating system.
Extracting Text from PDF File
Python package PyPDF can be used to achieve what we want (text extraction), although it can do more than what we need. This package can also be used to generate, decrypting and merging PDF files.
Note: For more information, refer to Working with PDF files in Python
Installation
To install this package type the below command in the terminal.
pip install PyPDF2
Example:
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pdfFileObj = open('example.pdf', 'rb')
We opened the example.pdf in binary mode. and saved the file object as pdfFileObj.
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pdfReader = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(pdfFileObj)
Here, we create an object of PdfFileReader class of PyPDF2 module and pass the pdf file object & get a pdf reader object.
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print(pdfReader.numPages)
numPages property gives the number of pages in the pdf file. For example, in our case, it is 20 (see first line of output).
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pageObj = pdfReader.getPage(0)
Now, we create an object of PageObject class of PyPDF2 module. pdf reader object has function getPage() which takes page number (starting form index 0) as argument and returns the page object.
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print(pageObj.extractText())
Page object has function extractText() to extract text from the pdf page.
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pdfFileObj.close()
At last, we close the pdf file object.
