Is there an easy to use Python library to read a PDF file and extract its text?

This may come to you as a surprise, but PDF was never actually intended as a format for easy text extraction. Indeed, its primary purpose is to make sure that whatever is in the document would be displayed in a consistent manner across multiple platforms, as well as print identically (as much as that is possible) everywhere. This is achieved in many different ways, and sometimes goes as far as literally saying "this letter goes here, this letter goes here, and this letter goes here" in its internal language. So yes, the libraries to extract text from PDF are insanely complicated by necessity, and they sometimes do not even function properly, because PDF is not meant for that.

PyPDF2 has an extractText() function is very easy to use. As other people have noted, it is harder than it seems to get to text out of a PDF and the extractText is known not to work on every PDF, especially if it's formatted in a complicated way (e.g. pictures with captions, columns). I've heard it also has trouble with non-English language PDFs, but I haven't tried it.That said, it has worked fine for me in the past on simple PDFs, and only takes a few lines of code to get it going (although the resulting string will probably be in need of some regex massaging after). May be worth a shot for your case. A good tutorial is here: https://automatetheboringstuff.com/chapter13/ Example: def get_pdf_content(pdf_path, page_nums=[0]): content = '' p = file(pdf_path, "rb") pdf = pyPdf2.PdfFileReader(p) for page_num in page_nums: content += pdf.getPage(page_num).extractText() return content

Easy to use libraries will have a hard time extracting information from a PDF.Usually you will find space characters randomly in the text, or what seems like one line are actually two lines on top of each other  (so if the pdf says "Hello World" your library might read it as "H l  W r d\n el o or l").However the guys and gals at https://www.gini.net/ have a service that you can easily integrate into a python program that will extract information from the pdf (also works on images, etc.).

Since Python is designed as a language to process data of various types, it is natural to think of using Python extract and manipulate text data in the ubiquitous format PDF.For reading PDF files, you can use PyPDF module (see https://automatetheboringstuff.com/chapter13/).For writing PDF files, I would recommend using the ReportLab library, which appears to be quite mature and has been deployed in many systems (Windows, Linux, etc.). See here: http://www.reportlab.com.

Python has a lot of libraries for PDF extract,many of them have been discussed below.I would like to add up PDFMiner and Slate to the queuePDFMinerPDFMiner is a tool for extracting information from PDF documents. Unlike other PDF-related tools, it focuses entirely on getting and analyzing text data.PDFMiner allows one to obtain the exact location of text in a page, as well as other information such as fonts or lines. It includes a PDF converter that can transform PDF files into other text formats (such as HTML). It has an extensible PDF parser that can be used for other purposes than text analysis.Features Written entirely in Python. (for version 2.4 or newer) Parse, analyze, and convert PDF documents. PDF-1.7 specification support. (well, almost) CJK languages and vertical writing scripts support. Various font types (Type1, TrueType, Type3, and CID) support. Basic encryption (RC4) support. PDF to HTML conversion (with a sample converter web app). Outline (TOC) extraction. Tagged contents extraction. Reconstruct the original layout by grouping text chunks. Source distribution: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pdfminer/github: https://github.com/euske/pdfminer/Online Demo:(pdf -> html conversion webapp) http://pdf2html.tabesugi.net:8080/CommunityThe tutor has below mailing list is for users who want to ask questions.http://groups.google.com/group/pdfminer-users/Slate 0.5.2Slate is a Python package that simplifies the process of extracting text from PDF files. It depends on the PDFMiner package.Though PDFminer is simple it has its own drawbacks Getting simple things done, like extracting the text is quite complex. The program is not designed to return Python objects, which makes interfacing things irritating. It’s an extremely complete set of tools, with multiple and moderately steep learning curves. It’s not written with hackability in mind. Slate provides one class, PDF. PDF takes a file-like object and will extract all text from the document, presentating each page as a string of text >>> with open('example.pdf') as f: ... doc = slate.PDF(f) ... >>> doc [..., ..., ...] >>> doc[1] 'Text from page 2...' If your pdf is password protected, pass the password as the second argument >>> with open('secrets.pdf') as f: ... doc = slate.PDF(f, 'password') ... >>> doc[0] "My mother doesn't know this, but..." Author: Tim McNamara Home Page: http://github.com/timClicks/slate Quora Source:https://github.com/euske/pdfminer/http://github.com/timClicks/slateHappy Learning Python :)Cheers!