Python search pdf for text
Problem Show What I've done so far Is there a simple, effective method for reading PDF text, either by page, line, or the entire document? Or any other workarounds? asked Jun 13, 2013 at 23:07
2 This is called PDF mining, and is very hard because:
Tools like PDFminer use heuristics to group letters and words again based on their position in the page. I agree, the interface is pretty low level, but it makes more sense when you know what problem they are trying to solve (in the end, what matters is choosing how close from the neighbors a letter/word/line has to be in order to be considered part of a paragraph). An expensive alternative (in terms of time/computer power) is generating images for each page and feeding them to OCR, may be worth a try if you have a very good OCR. So my answer is no, there is no such thing as a simple, effective method for extracting text from PDF files - if your documents have a known structure, you can fine-tune the rules and get good results, but it is always a gambling. I would really like to be proven wrong. [update] The answer has not changed but recently I was involved with two projects: one of them is using computer vision in order to extract data from scanned hospital forms. The other extracts data from court records. What I learned is:
So there is no reliable and effective method for extracting text from PDF files but you may not need one in order to solve the problem at hand (document type classification). answered Jun 14, 2013 at 0:52
Paulo ScardinePaulo Scardine 69.5k10 gold badges124 silver badges149 bronze badges 4 I am totally a green hand, but this script works for me:
answered Jun 10, 2018 at 3:46
Emma YuEmma Yu 5035 silver badges6 bronze badges 4 I've written extensive systems for the company I work for to convert PDF's into data for processing (invoices, settlements, scanned tickets, etc.), and @Paulo Scardine is
correct--there is no completely reliable and easy way to do this. That said, the fastest, most reliable, and least-intensive way is to use answered Jun 14, 2013 at 1:07
MikeHunterMikeHunter 4,0041 gold badge18 silver badges13 bronze badges 4 I recently started using ScraperWiki to do what you described. Here's an example of using ScraperWiki to extract PDF data. The You can then use BeautifulSoup to parse that into a navigatable tree. Here's my code for -
This code is going to print a whole, big ugly pile of If you want the content inside the If you only want each line of text, not including tags, use It's messy, and painful, but this will work for searchable PDF docs. So far I've found this to be accurate, but painful. answered Nov 14, 2015 at 7:38
JasTonAChairJasTonAChair 1,8981 gold badge18 silver badges30 bronze badges 2 Here is the solution that I found it comfortable for this issue. In the text variable you get the text from PDF in order to search in it. But I have kept also the idea of spiting the text in keywords as I found on this website: https://medium.com/@rqaiserr/how-to-convert-pdfs-into-searchable-key-words-with-python-85aab86c544f from were I took this solution, although making nltk was not very straightforward, it might be useful for further purposes:
answered Dec 1, 2017 at 12:12
I agree with @Paulo PDF data-mining is a huge pain. But you might have success with http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html This should be sufficient for your purpose if you are just looking for single keywords.
answered Jun 14, 2013 at 1:02
qwwqwwqqwwqwwq 6,6212 gold badges24 silver badges48 bronze badges If you are on bash, There is a nice tool called pdfgrep, Since, This is in apt repository, You can install this with:
It had served my requirements well. answered Jul 13, 2020 at 12:31
Appaji ChintimiAppaji Chintimi 4961 gold badge6 silver badges17 bronze badges Trying to pick through PDFs for keywords is not an easy thing to do. I tried to use the pdfminer library with very limited success. It’s basically because PDFs are pandemonium incarnate when it comes to structure. Everything in a PDF can stand on its own or be a part of a horizontal or vertical section, backwards or forwards. Pdfminer was having issues translating one page, not recognizing the font, so I tried another direction — optical character recognition of the document. That worked out almost perfectly. Wand converts all the separate pages in the PDF into image blobs, then you run OCR over the image blobs. What I have as a BytesIO object is the content of the PDF file from the web request. BytesIO is a streaming object that simulates a file load as if the object was coming off of disk, which wand requires as the file parameter. This allows you to just take the data in memory instead of having to save the file to disk first and then load it. Here’s a very basic code block that should be able to get you going. I can envision various functions that would loop through different URL / files, different keyword searches for each file, and different actions to take, possibly even per keyword and file.
answered May 10, 2020 at 15:10
This answer follows @Emma Yu's: If you want to print out all the matches of a string pattern on every page.
answered Nov 29, 2020 at 13:53
A version using PyMuPDF. I find it to be more robust than PyPDF2.
answered Nov 12, 2021 at 18:45
CamCam 1,06310 silver badges16 bronze badges Example with pdfminer.six
Compared to PyPDF2, it can work with cyrillic answered Dec 28, 2021 at 0:05
RugnarRugnar 2,6862 gold badges21 silver badges29 bronze badges How do you search for text in a PDF using Python?To get started using it with Python, we first need to install using pip.. pip3 install PyPDF2. ... . reader = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(file) ... . page = reader.getPage(PAGE_NUMBER) ... . page_content = page.extractText() ... . print(page_content) ... . if search_term in page_content: ... . for page_number in range(0, reader. ... . page = reader.getPage(page_number). Can you search a PDF for text?When a PDF is opened in the Acrobat Reader (not in a browser), the search window pane may or may not be displayed. To display the search/find window pane, use "Ctrl+F".
How do I extract specific text from a PDF in Python?Step 1: Import all libraries. Step 2: Convert PDF file to txt format and read data. Step 3: Use “. findall()” function of regular expressions to extract keywords.
How do I search for text in a PDF image?Once you use the Recognize Text tool to convert your scanned image into a usable PDF file, you can select and search through the text in that file, making it easy to find, modify, and reuse the information from your old paper documents. Select the Find text tool and enter text to search in the Find field.
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