You can also quite easily use pdfminer as a library. You have access to the pdf's content model, and can create your own text extraction. I did this to convert pdf contents to semi-colon separated text, using the code below.
The function simply sorts the TextItem content objects according to their y and x coordinates, and outputs items with the same y coordinate as one text line, separating the objects on the same line with ';' characters.
Using this approach, I was able to extract text from a pdf that no other tool was able to extract content suitable for further parsing from. Other tools I tried include pdftotext, ps2ascii and the online tool pdftextonline.com.
pdfminer is an invaluable tool for pdf-scraping.
def pdf_to_csv(filename):
from pdflib.page import TextItem, TextConverter
from pdflib.pdfparser import PDFDocument, PDFParser
from pdflib.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager, PDFPageInterpreter
class CsvConverter(TextConverter):
def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
TextConverter.__init__(self, *args, **kwargs)
def end_page(self, i):
from collections import defaultdict
lines = defaultdict(lambda : {})
for child in self.cur_item.objs:
if isinstance(child, TextItem):
(_,_,x,y) = child.bbox
line = lines[int(-y)]
line[x] = child.text
for y in sorted(lines.keys()):
line = lines[y]
self.outfp.write(";".join(line[x] for x in sorted(line.keys())))
self.outfp.write("\n")
# ... the following part of the code is a remix of the
# convert() function in the pdfminer/tools/pdf2text module
rsrc = PDFResourceManager()
outfp = StringIO()
device = CsvConverter(rsrc, outfp, "ascii")
doc = PDFDocument()
fp = open(filename, 'rb')
parser = PDFParser(doc, fp)
doc.initialize('')
interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrc, device)
for i, page in enumerate(doc.get_pages()):
outfp.write("START PAGE %d\n" % i)
interpreter.process_page(page)
outfp.write("END PAGE %d\n" % i)
device.close()
fp.close()
return outfp.getvalue()
UPDATE:
The code above is written against an old version of the API, see my comment below.
