How to Extract Text from a Pdf File?

Question

I'm trying to extract the text included in this PDF file using Python.

I'm using the PyPDF2 package (version 1.27.2), and have the following script:

import PyPDF2

with open("sample.pdf", "rb") as pdf_file:
    read_pdf = PyPDF2.PdfFileReader(pdf_file)
    number_of_pages = read_pdf.getNumPages()
    page = read_pdf.pages[0]
    page_content = page.extractText()
print(page_content)

When I run the code, I get the following output which is different from that included in the PDF document:

 ! " # $ % # $ % &% $ &' ( ) * % + , - % . / 0 1 ' * 2 3% 4
5
 ' % 1 $ # 2 6 % 3/ % 7 / ) ) / 8 % &) / 2 6 % 8 # 3" % 3" * % 31 3/ 9 # &)
%

How can I extract the text as is in the PDF document?

Accepted Answer

I was looking for a simple solution to use for python 3.x and windows. There doesn't seem to be support from textract, which is unfortunate, but if you are looking for a simple solution for windows/python 3 checkout the tika package, really straight forward for reading pdfs.

Tika-Python is a Python binding to the Apache Tika™ REST services allowing Tika to be called natively in the Python community.

from tika import parser # pip install tika

raw = parser.from_file('sample.pdf')
print(raw['content'])

Note that Tika is written in Java so you will need a Java runtime installed

Answer 2

I recommend to use pymupdf or pdfminer.six.

Edit: I recently became the maintainer of PyPDF2! 😁 There are some improvements in text extraction comming in 2022 to PyPDF2. For the moment, pymupdf still gives way better results. Have a look at the benchmark:

Those packages are not maintained:

PyPDF3, PyPDF4
pdfminer (without .six)

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How to read pure text with pymupdf

There are different options which will give different results, but the most basic one is:

import fitz # install using: pip install PyMuPDF

with fitz.open("my.pdf") as doc:
    text = ""
    for page in doc:
        text += page.get_text()

print(text)

How to Extract Text from a Pdf File?

32 Answers

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