Reading Adobe PDF File

[Shrewd Investor]

Hi,

I have a very large Adobe PDF file. I was hoping to use a script to
extract the information for it. Is there a way to loop through a PDF
file using Python?

Or do I need to find a way to convert a PDF file into a text file? If
so how?

Thanks!

 

[Shrewd Investor]

If somebody could point to me a resource (past posting, web page, and
book) so I could learn or by posting a sample script that would be
greatly appreciated?

 

[Chris Rebert]

Hi,

I have a very large Adobe PDF file.  I was hoping to use a script to
extract the information for it.  Is there a way to loop through a PDF
file using Python?

Haven't used it myself, but:
http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/python/pdfminer/

Or do I need to find a way to convert a PDF file into a text file?  If
so how?

The pdf2txt.py script from the same package happens to do exactly this.

Cheers,
Chris

 

[Matej Cepl]

Or do I need to find a way to convert a PDF file into a text file? If
so how?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdftotext ?

 

[Adam Tauno Williams]

Haven't used it myself, but:
http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/python/pdfminer/

It is very prone to hanging and/or crashing. I haven't yet found a
really reliably way to read text from a PDF.

PyPDF provides a PdfFileReader class with an extractText method. The
output is indeed the text although it can be a bit thorny to look at.